In the world of public health advocacy, few have been as effective – or as pioneering – as Florence Nightingale. While John Snow was analysing cholera in Soho, Nightingale was surveying the illnesses faced by British troops fighting in the Crimean war. Nightingale had arrived in late 1854 to lead a team of nurses in the military hospitals. She found that soldiers were dying at an astonishing rate. It wasn’t just the fighting that was killing them; it was infections like cholera, typhoid, typhus and dysentery. In fact, infections were the main source of death. During 1854, eight times more
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