Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Volume 5

Nightingale’s Quetelet

Nightingale’s Quetelet The key to understanding Florence Nightingale’s social science is the methodology of the Belgian statistician, L.A.J. Quetelet, her mentor in all matters statistical and, more broadly, methodological. We begin then with what she acquired from him and how she built on it. It was his methodology or philosophy of science that gave Nightingale a positive, constructive alternative to the ‘‘desperate wickedness’’ of the world, the means of turning ‘‘original sin’’ into ‘‘original good.’’ The desire to do this stems from her religious faith, with a little help from the insights into the ancient Egyptian religion and gnosticism she acquired in Egypt. But it was not until Nightingale had assimilated Quetelet’s social physics that she had any practical means for doing this. Quetelet’s methodology , in other words, is the link between her faith and her social activism. Not surprisingly, he has appeared in the preceding volumes on religion. Now in Society and Politics there is a major section of work on how Nightingale drew her methodology of social science from him, and how the two collaborated in making social statistics more reliable and useful. There is also material here on how Nightingale tried to improve the census in Britain (a subject on which Quetelet was an expert but in which he was not directly involved). The last part of the statistics section relates her (unsuccessful) attempt to promote his methodology through the institution of a chair or readership in social physics at Oxford University. Roughly one quarter of this volume deals with the Nightingale-Quetelet connection either directly using his work or at least as she was influenced by him. / 11 Quetelet is now often omitted from histories of sociological theory1 although histories of statistics give him the credit he is due.2 Yet he was enormously influential in his day, in Britain and France as well as in his native Belgium. The distinguished astronomer Sir John Herschel (astronomy was Quetelet’s field also) helped circulate his ideas in Britain, notably giving Quetelet’s book on probability an extensive and highly favourable review in the Edinburgh Review. Quetelet attended the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Cambridge, 1834. Two of his major works were translated into English: the first edition of Physique sociale, 1835, published as A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, 1842, and Letters on the Theory of Probabilities, in French in 1846, in English in 1849. Quetelet had taught probability theory to Prince Albert (the above letters were dedicated to the prince’s brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and a fellow pupil). Thus, when Quetelet came to chair the second International Statistical Congress in 1860 in London (he had already chaired the first, 1853, in Brussels), he was a well-known figure. Interestingly, another social scientist of the day, Karl Marx, was a Quetelet dévoté. Nightingale’s analysis of Quetelet’s work and the drawing of practical methodological principles from it considerably predates the methodological work of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Beatrice Webb, sociologists (especially the first two) frequently cited in histories of theory for work in the 1890s. The marginal annotations to Quetelet’s Physique sociale show Nightingale’s thorough working through of his major work. She was already familiar with the 1835 edition and knew two other Quetelet publications: Système social, 1848, and Anthropométrie, 1870. She used his methodology in the data analysis for Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions, and sent him a copy, October 1872, with an appreciative inscription: ‘‘Hommage à Monsieur Quetelet, auteur de nous tous, sa petite ‘camarade,’ Florence Nightingale, reconnaissante (qui attend avec la plus grande impatience sa prochaine edition de la Physique sociale.’’ Quetelet responded with a copy of the second edition of his 1 He is included in mine: Lynn McDonald, Early Origins of the Social Sciences 254-57 (on Quetelet); 257-61 (Quetelet-Nightingale). 2 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, ‘‘Notes on the History of Quantification’’; Stephen M. Stigler, History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900; Theodore M. Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900; and M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research. 12 / Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics Physique sociale (now held in University College Manuscripts). He ignored her pleas for a new edition; the 1869 edition was in fact the second French edition; there...