Florence Nightingale's India: The untold legacy

Florence Nightingale rewired British India's health system with data, charts, and reform, long after Crimea.

Transcript

00:00She is the lady with the lamb, but Florence Nightingale, born 12th May 1820, spent the

00:09rest of her life staring at statistics, not candles and many of those numbers came from

00:14India. After the Crimean War ended in 1856, Nightingale never returned to frontline nursing.

00:26The Crimean fever left her chronically ill. During the war, she revolutionised battlefield

00:31care, cutting death rates from 42% to 2% through just sanitation reforms. Though bedridden later,

00:37she remained mentally sharp, turning to data and public health policy as her new battleground.

00:42So back from the Crimean War, Nightingale discovers that one third of all British soldiers dying

00:47overseas are dying in India, not in battle but from cholera and dysentery. So she writes

00:52a 900-page report, which is called Notes on the Sanitary State of the Army in India. It

00:56comes out in 1863. This report is packed with death rate tables and pie chart cousins she

01:02invents. Her verdict? Barracks in Madras in Bengal sit on marshy land, so you dig drains. Latrins

01:08are too close to wells, so you move them. Soldiers' wives lack midwives, so you train Indian nurses.

01:141867, Nightingale persuades St. Stephen's Hospital in Delhi to start the first formal nursing school

01:19for Indian women. Can you believe it? Manuals arrive in Urdu and Bengali. The syllabus mixes

01:24anatomy charts with lessons on patient dignity, which is her phrase. Her rose diagrams make

01:30it impossible for London to ignore India's death curves. Today, data scientists still cite

01:35Nightingale as one of the first to turn raw numbers into policy graphics. In 2020, Google

01:41named its new data visualisation hub, Project Nightingale.

01:44Okay, so India now trains over 2 lakh nurses a year, the largest exporter of nursing staff

01:49to the Gulf and the UK. During COVID-19, Kerala's Nightingale Award winners ran tele-ICUs echoing

01:55Nightingale's 19th century letters on remote triage. Army hospitals in Pune and Lucknow still

02:01mark Nightingale Day with cleanliness audits, her favourite drill. So the next time you picture

02:06Florence Nightingale, add a ledger and a map of India to the lamp. Because she didn't

02:11just change one wartime hospital, she rewired an entire empire's approach to health starting

02:17right here in India.

02:18I am Manish Adhikari. Thank you for watching The Culture Project on More.

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