In the 1870s, Parliament passed several public health acts. Death rates in the UK began to fall, and life expectancy to rise. What makes Florence Nightingale’s story so striking is that she was able to see that statistics could be tools and weapons at the same time. She appreciated the importance of solid foundations such as the tedious tasks of standardising definitions and getting everyone to fill in the right forms, and of producing ‘the dryest of all’ analyses, impervious to attack from the critics.
Stats = tools and weapons
