You look extremely young,” said Miss Nightingale….”Age isn’t really a matter of years, I find,” returned Phemie. “I know people twice my age who will never be as old as I am now.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

Her statistics were more than a study… For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all...