Florence Nightingale
The daughter of wealthy English parents, named after the city of her birth; against her family’s wishes she trained as a nurse — work her circle thought unseemly. In the Crimean War she came to the army hospital outside Constantinople and found a death rate higher than the fighting’s: the wounded were dying of typhus, cholera and dysentery. Washing, laundry, ventilation and drains cut it several times over, and the “lady with the lamp” going round the wards at night became a legend in her own lifetime. At home she turned the legend into work: she gathered the statistics, devised the diagram that shows at a glance what soldiers die of, forced through a reform of army medicine and opened the first secular school of nursing in 1860. She was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society.
She was born in Florence on 12 May 1820 at 14:00 local mean time — Italy had no single time then. The hour comes from the family record.