emily young

Brasseur, Lee. “Florence Nightingale’s Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams.” Technical Communication Quarterly 14, no. 2 (2005): 161-82

Florence Nightingale was more than a nurse, she was a skilled statistician who developed the rose diagram to as a tool to convince her detractors to implement her suggestions for hygienic reform in battlefield hospitals. The British government hired Nightingale to find a solution to the high death toll of its wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. Nightingale found that sanitary and management reform was necessary. When she returned to England, the Royal Commission hired her to create a report on her experience; however, her suggestions in the report were never acted upon, and a rebuttal pamphlet claimed her statistics were incorrect. Nightingale needed to defend her statistics and convince the right people that her findings would save lives. She responded by creating three diagrams that explained her findings. The first diagram shows how mortality on the warfront was much higher than average mortality in Manchester (commonly known to be an unhealthy town). The second divided the warfront mortality by wounds, disease, and other, and disease was the leading cause of death. The third diagram showed how mortality decreased after she began sanitary measures. Nightingale’s diagrams led to reforming military barracks and hospitals, drafting of a sanitary code, establishing a military hospital, and other physical alterations. Nightingale created these diagrams during “an active period in instructional design” from 1859-1899. (I bet she owned a sewing machine!) However, the contemporary example by Minard was not effective because I could not understand it until I saw it in the Dragga and Voss article. Nightingale made many contributions to technical communication including hospital forms for collecting data, so it is interesting to note that she came from a world of science, but, I would argue, she also had the “passion, intellect, [and] moral activity” of a woman to lend a humanistic quality to her statistical diagrams.

Nightingale used ethos as well as pathos in her rhetoric when she added a plea to “expunge the blue wedges.” She might have made Dragga and Voss happy by adding a humanistic element to her stark statistical diagrams. Nightingale created successful diagrams because, even though we do not have access to her report, we can still interpret her findings. Nightingale faced the same problems as modern technical communicators: how do I present this information visually, so it is stimulating and understandable? What Nightingale unwittingly created was multifaceted. Her rose diagrams can be translated easily, they appeal to a visual leaning style, and can be understood by someone who cannot read well.