Florence Nightingale

The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe, how to observe, what symptoms indicate improvement, what the reverse, which are of importance, which are of none. Observation is not decoration on care. Observation is care.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted on either sick or well. The patient does not need displays of tenderness so much as the conditions under which the body can rest, breathe, sleep, and heal.

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. When a soldier died who should have lived, I wrote down why and what had killed him. Not fate, not the enemy, not providence. There is always a cause, and causes can be prevented if someone is willing to find them.

Nursing is an art, and if it is to be made an art, it requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work. For what is the having to do with dead canvas or cold marble, compared with having to do with the living body — the temple of God's spirit?

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm. I say this because in my experience the hospital's primary function has often been to manufacture disease through poor ventilation, contaminated water, and the proximity of the dying to the recovering.

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. Statistics are not a dry subject. They are a moral tool. When I showed the generals my coxcomb diagram — the rose chart of causes of death — I was showing them, with undeniable precision, that their negligence was killing more men than Russian artillery. You cannot argue with a well-drawn...

The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply. Disease is not mysterious when filth, crowding, bad drainage, and stale air are treated as ordinary conditions of life. Statistics are not dry numbers when every column is a preventable grave.

To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. I invented the polar area diagram — what some call the coxcomb — to show that in the Crimea, preventable disease killed ten times more soldiers than enemy fire. No one believed it until they saw the chart.

People expect me to be sentimental. They have the image of the Lady with the Lamp — moving through the wards at night at Scutari, holding a lantern, comforting the dying. The reality was that I was also fighting the British Army Medical Department, the Purveyor's Department, and the Principal Medical Officer simultaneously, while compiling mortality...

I invented the polar area diagram — what statisticians later called the coxcomb chart — to show the causes of mortality among British soldiers in the Crimea. The military commanders understood battles; they did not understand numbers.

The chart showed, visually and immediately, that of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimea, only about 2,000 were from wounds...

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm. I arrived at Scutari and found the wards killing men faster than the battles. Cholera. Typhus. Dysentery. All preventable with soap and ventilation. I brought soap. I brought data — careful records of cause of death, compared across wards, across seasons, across hospitals. The...

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women. No woman who has done this can ever again be surprised by the fundamental equality of suffering. Pain does not negotiate with rank.