Dana Bullister on Florence Nightingale

Data scientist, former Cambridge City Council candidate, world traveler, and Boston area local, Dana seeks to bring new perspectives to solving local government challenges. We discuss government transparency, equity, civic engagement, and more as well as her various passions and pursuits.

She discussed her admiration of Florence Nightingale and how she inspired her to build a successful life.

Immortalized as the lady with the lamp, Florence Nightingale was a highly intelligent, mathematically astute pioneer of better health outcomes. Her innovations resulted in lower death rates – first in hospitals, then in wider society.

She formulated and implemented enormous reforms of nurse training and nursing practices. Before Nightingale’s reforms, nurses were seen as unhygienic and unreliable. Afterwards, they were seen as clean, medically trained, and well-disciplined.

After experiencing first-hand the reluctance of people in government to change the way things were done, and realizing they were often too lazy to read reports, she started presenting statistics as pictures, popularizing the polar area diagram.