ABSTRACT
Florence Nightingale's hospital statistical table, which she designed to record data about patients in British hospitals, was a landmark in medical record-keeping. Most enthusiasts of the technical visual know Nightingale's most famous graphic—the rose diagram—that she designed from original tables of data to change the queen's and Parliament's actions regarding treatment of soldiers in wartime hospitals. Nightingale wanted hospital personnel to be able to collect, combine, and analyze data so they knew how to treat future patients. It is also true that while Nightingale was working on her hospital tabular forms that patients were laying in British hospitals with little standardized treatment. It was important, then, for Nightingale to design a tabular form for hospitals that could serve as a record-keeping device and an important visual tool to record medical information as it occurs, in a form that then could later be studied and understood over time.
