ABSTRACT
Few books made a greater impression on Miss Nightingale than those of Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian astronomer, meteorologist, and statistician; and she had few friends whom she valued more highly than Dr William Farr, the leading statistician of her day in this country. From his meteorological studies, Quetelet deduced a law of the flowering of plants. One of his cases was the lilac. The common lilac flowers, according to Quetelet’s law, when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperatures, counted from the end of the frosts, equals 4264° centigrade. Miss Nightingale was greatly interested in such calculations, and the lilac had a special place in her year. Lady Verney’s birthday was April 19, and a branch of flowering lilac was Florence’s regular birthday present to her sister. Miss Nightingale used to talk of Quetelet’s law with great delight, and commended it to gardening friends for verification in their Naturalist’s Diaries. But this is a lighter example of Quetelet’s researches. What fascinated Miss Nightingale most was his Essai de physique sociale, in which he showed the possibility of applying the statistical method to social dynamics, and deduced from such method various conclusions with regard to the physical and intellectual qualities of man. In regard to sanitation, we have heard already of the reforms which Miss Nightingale was instrumental in carrying out in Army Medical Statistics. She turned next to the question of Hospital Statistics, where improvement seemed desirable both for the surer advance of medical knowledge and in the interests of good administration.
