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May 12
Florence Nightingale, Minna Canth, and Edme Mariotte
David Barnhart
May 12, 2025
Snake in a snag. Alabama, 2024. Own photo.
Today is the birthday, in 1820, of Florence Nightingale, who not only created the model for modern nursing, but also used statistics, writing, and social activism to massively impact modern medicine. She wrote that at several points in her life she felt called by God to work among the sick and the poor. During the Crimean War, she once used a hammer to break into a storage unit to gain access to medicines for soldiers. She used statistics and data in her arguments that unsanitary and unsafe conditions led to higher death rates in hospitals.
Today marks the death, in 1897, of Minna Canth, a Finnish feminist and writer. She argued fiercely for equality for women and for economic justice in her plays and her writing.
Today is also the feast day of Edme Mariotte, a French priest and physicist who, among other things, discovered the human blind spot and Boyle’s Law (about the relationship between gas volume and pressure).
Reflection:
Although I cannot verify these quotes, they are attributed to Minna Canth:
“Anything but a dry, half-dead life!”
and
"The woman question is not only a woman question but a question of humanity."
Florence Nightingale said:
“To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.”
Were she alive today, I am certain Florence Nightingale would use statistics to point out how we in the United States spend more money than any other industrialized country for worse healthcare outcomes, largely because our health care is rationed so as to provide the greatest possible income to insurance company executives and profit to shareholders.
She also said:
“If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.”
and
“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.”
Prayer: God, all truth is Your truth, including what is revealed to our rational, God-given minds through science and data. Help us to make wiser decisions informed not by strong opinions or ideological commitments, but by data and a deep love of life. Amen.