The Mother of Statistics
After last night’s program, The Joy of Stats, it was good to see one of Florence Nightingale‘s coxcomb charts in the business pages of The Times in an article headed, Bloodied but largely unbowed, things are looking up for Toyota. The chart has been missed off the web edition.
She was so much more than the Lady with the Lamp.
She also had a massive input into Brunel’s design for the prefabricated hospital at Renkioi in the Crimea. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia.
Brunel was working on the Great Eastern amongst other projects, but accepted the task in February 1855 of designing and building the War Office requirement of a temporary, pre-fabricated hospital that could be shipped to Crimea and erected there. In 5 months he designed, built, and shipped pre-fabricated wood and canvas buildings, providing them complete with advice on transportation and positioning of the facilities. They were subsequently erected near Scutari Hospital, where Nightingale was based, in the malaria-free area of Renkioi.
His designs incorporated the necessities of hygiene: access to sanitation, ventilation, drainage, and even rudimentary temperature controls. They were feted as a great success, with some sources stating that of the approximately 1,300 patients treated in the Renkioi temporary hospital, there were only 50 deaths. In the Scutari hospital it replaced, deaths were said to be as many as 10 times this number. Nightingale referred to them as “those magnificent huts”. The practice of building hospitals from pre-fabricated modules survives today, with hospitals such as the Bristol Royal Infirmary being created in this manner.
Sad to say, we don’t solve problems in that way anymore. Today’s civil servants would never let two people like Nightingale and Brunel even talk to each other, as they would come up with something that made the civil servants all look to be the dunderheads they inevitably are.
Remember that it takes twelve civil servants to change a light bulb. One to actually change the bulb and eleven to do the paperwork.
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