Named for the Tuscan city of her birth, Florence Nightingale would grow up to revolutionize battlefield medicine during the Crimean War and found the first scientifically grounded nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Her statistical work on sanitation and mortality also made her a pioneer of data visualization in medicine.
Florence Nightingale was born into privilege on May 12, 1820, in the Italian city that gave her a name most nurses today still recognize instantly. Her father, a wealthy landowner, ensured she received an unusually rigorous education for a Victorian woman, including mathematics and languages, which she later turned into pioneering statistical analysis of hospital mortality.
Despite her family's objections, she pursued nursing, a profession then associated with disreputable, uneducated women rather than genteel ladies. Her chance came in 1854 when she led a team of nurses to the Crimean War, where she found soldiers dying more often from disease and unsanitary conditions than from combat wounds.
Her rose diagrams, an early form of infographic, convinced skeptical officials that hygiene reforms saved lives, cutting death rates dramatically at the Scutari hospital. She later became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society, and International Nurses Day is now celebrated each year on her birthday in her honor.