Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Florence Nightingale’s interest in statistics
John Bibby, York, and Alison McFarlane, City University, London

This special meeting (organised jointly by the Yorkshire Philosophical
Society and the York branch of the Royal Statistical Society) will be
addressed by Alison Macfarlane and John Bibby to commemorate the
centenary of Florence Nightingale’s death. It will cover FN’s
statistical writings, her links with York and Yorkshire, and her
attempts with Jowett, Galton and Quetelet to get a Chair in Statistics
at Oxford.

The talk will be be preceded at 7pm by a small reception and followed by dinner with the speakers, to which all are invited to attend at their own expense.

Report
by Carole Smith
John Bibby set Florence Nightingale in her context – the daughter of a very wealthy and well-connected family, born at the start of a century of peace in Europe, attracted to female emancipation and with an interest in mathematics and statistics. Famous as the Lady with the Lamp, she was much more the Passionate Statistician, and a very modern evidence-based health manager. Her role in improving conditions in military hospitals owed much to her social and political connections.
Alison McFarlane discussed her statistical analysis of maternal mortality rates in different institutions, from the workhouse to the lying-in hospitals, compared with home births. It was safer to give birth in a workhouse than a hospital, and infinitely safer to give birth even in a London hospital than in a Parisian one. Her ideas about better nursing training and hospital ward design to minimise the problem of cross-infection were beginning to be taken seriously before she died in 1910.

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