NIGHTINGALE

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874, Belgian Astronomer, Mathematician, Statistician and Sociologist) had a significant influence on Florence Nightingale who shared with him a religious view of statistics which saw understanding statistics as revealing the work of God in addition to statistics being a force of good administration. Nightingale met Quetelet in person at the 1860 International Statistical Congress in London, and they corresponded for years afterwards. Although the recipient’s name is struck through, it has to be Dr William FARR (1807-1883), one of the founding figures of medical statistical science, who was a close colleague of Nightingale’s. Some of their correspondence is held by the Wellcome Library in London. It was in October 1858 “on the nomination of Farr” that “Nightingale was elected a fellow of the Statistical Society of London” (Oxford DNB). She was the first female member of the society. Farr was also a prominent correspondent of the famous scientist Adolphe Quetelet and Farr met with Quetelet in Saint Petersburg, as this letter suggests. Inan article about the surviving correspondence between Farr and Quetelet it mention that the last time the two men met was likely in 1872 at Saint Petersburg. Quetelet’s impact on Nightingale was enormous. The scholar Karl Pearson writes that “Florence Nightingale has been rightly termed the ‘Passionate Statistician.’ For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page” (Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1924), vol. 2, p. 414). This letter seems to be essentially a hitherto-unknown companion letter to another important letter that she wrote the same day to Quetelet. That letter is reproduced in translation as an appendix in James Tanner’s History of the Study of Human Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), page 141. In these letter one can see Nightingale and Farr co-ordinating and conferring on their communications from and to the great Belgian scientist Adolphe Quetelet who had influenced and enriched their work so much, and whose life was nearing its end. He would die less than two years later, on February 17th of 1874.