Florence Nightingale

Nurse Who Revolutionized War & Hospital Sanitation Practices

When assigned the impossible task of managing a war hospital built atop a festering cesspool during the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale rose to the task and went above and beyond—cleaning the entire building, introducing hygiene practices into the daily routines, and lowering the hospital’s death rate from nearly 50% to 2.2%. Afterwards, she devoted her life to better medical and hygiene practices, going so far as to invent new forms of data visualization to convince policymakers that her plans, along with better nurse training, could save lives.