Next, material is reported comparing British Army death rates with those of the French Army. Instead several adaptations are presented and the two less known, but most useful, black-and-white charts are. Since the (one) coloured chart is well known and readily available online, it is not reproduced here. She gave them next to Harriet Martineau for inclusion in her popular book, England and Her Soldiers (Martineau, 1859), where again they were not discussed. In January of 1859 Nightingale published a short paper which focused on those charts, ‘A contribution to the sanitary history of the British Army during the late war with Russia’ (Nightingale,1859a). The landmark charts, however, appear with scarcely a comment. That report includes an enormous number of tables, with detailed discussion. They appeared first in Nightingale’s privately circulated Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army (Nightingale, 1858a). These charts were not included in the official Royal Commission report (UK, 1858a) or the shorter version based on it (UK, 1858b). He had already published charts on cholera, but the polar area charts he did with Nightingale went far beyond his earlier work. Her major collaborator was William Farr, Superintendent of Statistics at the General Register Office, and the most noted medical statistician of the time. Nightingale started to work on ascertaining the causes of the high death rates immediately on her return to London.
On her statistical work see McDonald (2003) and Stone (1997). She never glorified war but came to understand that good could come out of evil: in the case of Crimea the end of serfdom in Russia, the creation of a new profession of nursing in Britain and major reforms in healthcare and nutrition for ordinary soldiers in the British Army, The methodology that she acquired post war in analysing what went wrong would ground her decades-long campaigns for social and healthcare reform. The Crimean War was formative for Nightingale, both for the lessons that she learned from it and the status that she acquired from her work. The UK stayed out of the next ‘Balkan wars’. Moreover, Russia soon began to make belligerent moves in the Balkans.
#Florence nightingale crimean war free
The gains made by the war were negligible, such as free access to trade on the Danube. The vast majority of Crimean War deaths were due to preventable diseases. The death rates were appalling: for the British Army 22.7% of troops sent, an even higher 30.9% for the French Army and an unknown (high) number for the Russians, compared with 2.3% of American troops during the Vietnam War. Florence Nightingale’s work in it is reported in detail in McDonald (2010). The Crimean War (1854–1856) was a terrible war by any reasonable criteria.
The contention in the secondary literature that Nightingale was responsible for the high death rates in the war hospitals is rebutted, with comparative death rate data from the different hospitals. French statistical reports comparing British and French Army deaths are reported. These are then adapted to give a more accurate portrayal of the relative causes of war hospital deaths. The paper presents Florence Nightingale’s statistical work on the Crimean War, beginning with her iconic polar area charts. Lessons for hosptial safety, public administration and nursing
Florence Nightingale and her Crimean War Statistics:
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