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cover of episode Florence Nightingale and Her Geeks Declare War on Death

Florence Nightingale and Her Geeks Declare War on Death

2021/3/5
logo of podcast Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

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Florence Nightingale and her team arrived at the Scutari hospital during the Crimean War to find appalling conditions and a high death toll among the wounded soldiers due to poor sanitation and disease.

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Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back her public health campaigns.

Her charts convinced the great and the good that deaths due to filth and poor sanitation could be averted - saving countless lives. But did Nightingale open Pandora's Box, showing that graphs persuade, whether or not they depict reality?

Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/)

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