GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020 - 21

cover story

A painting of Nightingale
in Therapia hospital (Getty)

make effective interventions in public health.
Like many public health experts of her age,
Nightingale considered the home to be a crucial site for disease-preventing interventions.
This was the place where most people contracted and suffered from infectious diseases.
(The same is true today: in Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak, around 75-80 per cent of transmissions were reportedly in family.
Nightingale strongly counselled that people
open windows to maximize light and ventilation and displace "stagnant, musty and corrupt"
air. And she advocated improving drainage to
combat water-borne diseases like cholera and
typhoid.
21 GRAND

SPRING 2020

In her view, all domestic interiors must be
kept clean. Dirty carpets and unclean furniture,
she wrote with characteristic bluntness, "pollute the air just as much as if there were a dung
heap in the basement".
Notes on Nursing also called upon the "mistress" of every building to clean "every hole
and corner" of her home regularly, for the sake
of her family's health. But Nightingale also recommended a more holistic approach to health.
She encouraged soldiers to read, write and
socialize during their convalescence so they
would not sink into boredom and alcoholism.

Good data

During her youth, Nightingale's father had
introduced her to a leading practitioner of statistics, then a new academic field, and paid for
her to have a mathematics tutor. During and
after the Crimean War, Nightingale seized on
statistics as a way of proving the effectiveness
of different interventions.
She went on to produce her famous diagrams, which demonstrated the high proportion of soldiers' deaths caused by disease as
opposed to battle wounds and became the
first woman admitted to the London Statistical
Society in 1858.

Nightingale encouraged soldiers to read,
write and socialize during their convalescence
so they would not sink into boredom and
alcoholism
Thereafter she designed questionnaires to
obtain data on such questions as the sanitary condition of army stations in India, or
the mortality rates of the indigenous populations in Australia. Her guiding principle was
that a health problem could only be effectively tackled once its dimensions were reliably
established.
In 1857, around a year after returning from
the Crimean War, Nightingale suffered a severe
collapse, now believed to have been caused by
a flu-like infection called brucellosis. For much
of her subsequent life, she was racked with
chronic pain, often unable to walk or leave her
bed.

Working from home

Having been declared an invalid, she
imposed a rule of seclusion on herself because
of pain and tiredness rather than from fears
of contagion - a form of self-isolation that
extended to her closest family (though she still
had servants and other visitors).
Continued on next page

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GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020