To do so she would use her evidence that deaths from sickness had been reduced during the war.So looking at the column chart which I drew in an attempt to ‘improve’ Nightingale’s chart, what is wrong with it as far as supporting Nightingale’s ‘sanitarian’ message? It has 3 defects:ġ) The war lasted exactly two years, and fortuitously the Sanitary Commission and the death rate reduction arrived exactly in the middle she wanted to compare the two years to show the situation ‘before and after’, but the column chart simply contrasts each month with preceding and succeeding months. Nightingale wanted to use the Rose Diagram to convince people that the Chief Medical Officer was wrong, and that deaths from epidemic disease were avoidable.
![nightingale and rose diagram mortality nightingale and rose diagram mortality](https://infowetrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1.jpg)
The second says that England’s Chief Medical Officer, John Simon, was obstructing her in this task. The first says that she wants to use the results of what she called ‘the Scutari experiment’ to save millions of lives back home in England and throughout the world. “ has been led to assert that the great mortality from important classes of zymotic disease is practically unavoidable.” “Let us now ask, how it was that our noble army all but perished in the East? And we shall at the same time learn how it has happened that so many hundreds of millions of the human race have by pestilence perished before their time.” So what message did Nightingale want to support? She first published her famous Rose Diagram in her Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army (1859), the text of which is not as famous as her diagram. But when I redrew her chart in this format I could see that it didn’t convey the same message. My graphics tutor was a data expert but in management consulting one tends to use graphics to present messages, not data, and there is a rule number zero that ‘your graphic should support the message, the whole message, and nothing but the message’.
NIGHTINGALE AND ROSE DIAGRAM MORTALITY SERIES
I had been taught by a graphics expert that rule number one in statistical graphics is ‘time series data should be presented with time running on a horizontal axis from left to right’, a rule which her Rose Diagram disobeys. I reformatted her data into this column chart when I began investigating her post-war arguments. Why didn’t she make a column chart like the one below? Many people say it would have made the data clearer.
![nightingale and rose diagram mortality nightingale and rose diagram mortality](https://nightingaledvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nightingale.jpeg)
What I want to do today is to put the diagram into its textual and political context and see what results Nightingale obtained from it.
![nightingale and rose diagram mortality nightingale and rose diagram mortality](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/85/32/fa8532385fea61086646e22136f1a327.jpg)
I dare say you have all seen this diagram far too often it is variously called the Rose Diagram, the Coxcomb, or (her name for it) the Wedges.