Florence Nightingale Bicentennial celebration
Commissioned by NHS Trust of Guys and St Thomas’
In 2020, to mark the bicentenary of Florence Nightingale’s birth, I created a set of postcards celebrating her pioneering role in data visualization. Nightingale was not only the founder of modern nursing but also one of the earliest practitioners of using visual statistics to influence public health and policy. Her conviction that “statistics is the most important science in the whole world” inspired me to create designsthat foreground her words alongside visual data.
The Rose and the Data
The postcards draw on Nightingale’s famous “coxcomb” diagrams – among the first examples of modern infographics – which she used to communicate the devastating impact of poor sanitation during the Crimean War. By juxtaposing her original statistical insights with contemporary data from Our World in Data, the designs connect her 19th-century innovations to 200 years of social progress. Indicators such as child survival, literacy, democracy, and poverty reduction demonstrate how data and evidence, when made visible, can drive human advancement.
A Gift of Visual Statistics
This work celebrates Nightingale’s enduring legacy: her gift for making numbers tell a human story. The postcards present statistics not as abstractions, but as a measure of compassion, justice, and progress. They remind us that data visualization can be a powerful moral instrument, shaping policy, inspiring reform, and improving lives. In bringing her words and diagrams into the present, the project honours Nightingale’s vision of statistics as the essential tool for understanding – and transforming – our world.
