There was a good film about 19C nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale on the BBC.

The Lady with the Lamp is remembered for her work in the Crimean war (1850s) where she, and a group of volunteers, transformed the conditions at the military hospital at Scutari.

Upon arrival, she discovered that conditions were much worse than had been reported. Battlefield surgery was basically amputation of arms and legs, and hope-for-the-best without antibiotics or post-op care. In these circumstances many more soldiers died of infection than from enemy action.

Nightingale understood this as a moral and political scandal and was insistent upon demanding adequate resource to address this problem. She set herself up against a military-industrial and political system that viewed these deaths as heroic, whilst ignoring them.

The administrative powers were able to ignore these deaths because they couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t believe her figures. By plotting these graphs, she revealed the appalling truth…

The film didn’t mention Florence Nightingale’s use of statistics and diagrams to make her case. That was a shame. Nowadays she is recognised as a pioneer of information design. Nor was there any mention of Mary Seacole who also provided support for soldiers during the Crimean war. For various reasons Seacole is not recognised, by the medical establishment, as a “proper” nurse. Nevertheless, her pioneering work is now better known.

The film was built around a series of music-hall scenes derived from Joan Littlewood’s amazing WW1 drama, Oh What a Lovely War. There a film version of this, by Richard Attenborough, that is well worth watching.

It was interesting to watch this against the present day rhetoric of war against the virus and the similar lack of resource for care workers and patients. We are 200 years from Nightingale’s birth! There’s a Nightingale museum at St Thomas’ Hospital, London.

If you are wondering why the government’s powerpoint graphics are so underwhelming read Ed Tufte’s essay about the structural problems of this software. You can download the essay, here

https://www.are.na/block/7201845

The Crimean war was the first war to be comprehensively photographed, by Roger Fenton. You can see his images online. The war was also one of the first, along with the US Civil War in which the machinery of war had become bigger, faster and more dangerous…