Years 10-12 1855 and 2020 Florence Nightingale’s Pie Charts

Discuss these charts. The first was published in August 2020, and  is similar to Florence Nightingale’s 1885 pie charts. In both charts the radial distance gives the number of deaths for a year and both were produced  to  convey  a  health warning  and  send  messages  to  the British  Government. What  do you think these messages were?

The red line stops in August 2020; the  big  question  is  “what  will  happen  to  the  red  line  in  the  rest of the year?”  Use the internet to find the information you need to answer the question and continue the red line as far as you can. You  might  put  a copy  of  this  chart  on  the  wall  and  add  the  new  information  to  it  week  by  week  using  a different  colour  for  2021. Make a similar chart for your  own  country.

In Florence Nightingale’s charts, sent from the Crimean war zone, the areas of the blue wedges show the number of deaths of the British soldiers from avoidable diseases, the areas of the red wedges the numbers of deaths from wounds and the areas of the black wedges the number of deaths from other causes. The British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Crimea. The new hospital, and the sanitary measures introduced by Florence Nightingale, reduced the number of avoidable deaths. Looking at the areas of the graphs for the two years, when do you think the new field hospital was opened?

This image shows the original charts drawn by Florence Nightingale from an exhibit in the British Library.

Sources: The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine https://www.cebm.net/

An anonymous SAP community blog. 

The featured image of Florence Nightingale Redbubble

Florence Nightingale Museum https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/