In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Themes Law, Probability and Application F undamental to Nightingale’s philosophy and informing all her major writing is a notion of a created world run by laws, natural and social. This she described, briefly, as early as her Letters from Egypt, 1849-50, and developed the theme at length in Suggestions for Thought, 1852-60. It appears as well in her Fraser’s Magazine articles of 1873 and her unpublished essays; these are published in Theology. Nightingale’s main source for this conceptualization of law was the Belgian astronomer and statistician, L.A.J. Quetelet (1796-1874). Nightingale extensively annotated her copy of his major work, Physique sociale, copied out lengthy extracts from it and wrote her own comments and paraphrases (published in Society and Politics).1 She praised him for approaching ‘‘more nearly than anyone to Plato’s highest sense in dialectic.’’2 Like Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Quetelet had a sense of the immensity of the world to study and the modesty of the results to date; echoing Newton he had said, ‘‘These are only a few pebbles picked up on the vast seashore of statistics.’’3 Yet Quetelet was no less than the ‘‘founder of the most important science in the whole world, for upon it depends the practical application of every other and of every other art, the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education and all organization based on experience.’’ Without it government would otherwise be ‘‘guesswork, or as the Germans would say, ‘intuition.’ ’’4 1 Marion Diamond and Mervyn Stone, ‘‘Nightingale on Quetelet.’’ The annotated Physique sociale is held in the Archives of University College, London. 2 Note, Add Mss 45785 f35. 3 Draft letter to Francis Galton c1891, Add Mss 45810 f177. 4 Letter to Dr Farr ca. 23 February 1874, Wellcome Ms 5474/123. / 55 More positively, laws told people (God’s co-workers) how to intervene: modify the causes of a problem and you modify human behaviour, ‘‘free will and all.’’5 God governs by His laws, but so do we, when we have discovered them (f188). For Nightingale as well as Quetelet ‘‘free will’’ was a red herring and she resented the loss of time and energy in debating it. Her/their understanding of law did not immobilize people but, on the contrary, enabled people to act. Laws were descriptive, so that it was better to designate their discovery as ‘‘registering ’’ them; ‘‘We will not say [laws] subject man’s action in the plan of God’s moral government’’ (f144). Any laws discovered were only probabilistic. Quetelet, himself an expert in probability theory, she commended for being ‘‘always on his guard against confounding probability with truth’’ (f164). A ‘‘Sub ‘Note of Interrogation’ ’’ stated that ‘‘everything, down to the minutest particular, is so governed by laws, which can be seen in their effects, that not the most trifling action or feeling is left to chance’’ (reproduced in Theology 3:29). Yet, while nothing occurred by chance, unintended consequences were frequent and serious. She often gave as examples the establishment of foundling hospitals for abandoned babies, and almsgiving to the indigent, which only increased pauperism . (This was not to accept the political economists’ approach of non-intervention; the goal was to intervene constructively and effectively .) Nightingale quite specifically abhorred the ‘‘political economy’’ school, especially of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), then the reigning doctrine. The laws of political economy, if really discovered, are of course as immutable as the laws of nature, but at present there is scarcely any extravagance which political economy is not made to father, for example the workhouse test which probably has made more paupers than anything else—the theory that supply and demand will always, under all circumstances, in all countries, answer to each other—which made the Orissa famine possible under our ‘‘enlightened rule.’’6 5 Notes on Quetelet, Add Mss 45842 f168. 6 Note, Add Mss 45843 f34. 56 / Florence Nightingale: Her Life and Family ...

Share