My name is Crystal Donnally. I'm the deputy head of department at the Oxford Department of Statistics,
and I'm delighted to welcome you today for our Florence Nightingale Bicentenary lecture.
This was an event that was originally scheduled for the 18th of March,
but it was not able to go ahead because of code and control measures and required social distancing to keep us all safe.
But we're really pleased to be able to welcome you still within twenty 20.
So we're still respecting the bicentenary nature of this lecture.
The planning for this event began over five years ago, and we're extremely grateful to David Greene,
who's the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum for bringing people together,
setting up a Florence Nightingale 2020 planning committee and bringing together a wide range of professions.
And that was from both the UK and beyond.
So we could really leave a legacy of this and help people understand Florence Nightingale and what she stood for.
Please do take the opportunity to visit the virtual exhibition that we've compiled that includes you
being able to view some original correspondence between Florence Nightingale and Benjamin Jowett,
who is at the time warden of Balliol College.
You can find out about some modern nightingales and also learn more about the Florence Nightingale Museum and its work.
The link will be published on a slide during the break, which, as you can see on the schedule here, is between four and four fifteen.
I'd like to thank them individually, but the ICM s more generally for hosting this event and more widely for supporting
mathematical sciences through what has been a very difficult time for all of us.
We also thank X X markets who generously have sponsored this event and more generally this annual lecture series.
So they've been supportive over a long time period and specifically gave us additional funding to support
the creation of this bicentenary commemorative programme that hopefully many of you have received.
Finally, we'd like to give thanks to the RSS, the Royal Statistical Society, for their help and support in planning this event.
Now, hundreds of you are joining us today from around the world.
And those come from a range of disciplines, including medical research and nursing.
But in areas as well as government and education.
And just a general interest in Florence Nightingale and the history of science,
it is my great pleasure to welcome our speaker and my colleague, Professor Deborah Ashby.
She is director of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, where she holds the chair in medical statistics and clinical trials.
She was a founding co-director of the Imperial College Trials Unit.
She is a chartered statistician and her interests are in clinical trials at risk benefit
decision making for medicines and the utility of Bayesian approaches in these areas.
She has that on the UK Commission on Human Medicines and she acts as an adviser to the European Medicines Agency.
She was awarded an OBE for services to medicine in 2009.
She was appointed as an FDA H.R. senior investigator in 2010 and was elected as a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2012.
She is currently the president of the Royal Statistical Society and the supposedly be one of her last events in that capacity.
So we're very honoured to hear from her. Thank you very much. Thank you, Crystal.
So I just need to share my screen. She's.
Right. Is that shaving properly? Yes, read it.
So thank you so much for the invitation. It was one of the most advanced invitations I got.
I think it was more than a year, a year and a half in advance of when this was originally meant to be.
And thank you so much for reconvening. It influences bicentenary year.
So we got to talk about Florence Nightingale. She was born in.
If you're good at Sum's, you'll realise she was born in 1920. And she was born in the city of Florence.
This is her registration of her birth, which was done after her parents came back to this country.
But they'd named her after Florence. And this is slightly more legible.
It's got her family history and you can see that she and her sister path.
Nope. Are down on the left. They are the daughter of William and Frances.
If you look Hopwood's, you'll see that she should have been by rights or by convention anyway, named Florence Shaw.
But. The Nightingale name. Further up, the family of died out.
And so Aunt Evans, Elizabeth in her well, had basically left money to Florence's father so long as he changed his name to Nightingale.
And he wasn't a tough man. He did exactly that. And that provided some of the wealth that's enabled Florence to do what she did.
The other reason for sharing this very sensitive. The other is sharing this is that you will notice that Francis, her mother,
was the daughter of William Smith, who was named pay of many years standing.
And that, we will see, plays into Florence's life a bit later.
She died some 90 years later. And just a couple of things that I'll highlight on this one is that the death certificate is of a different format,
much more like the modern justifications that we use now. And we'll talk about that a little bit.
And the other I noticed when I put this up is that if you can see the person signing off the death, it's a garret, Anderson.
I can only imagine that's Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was the first female surgeon and physician.
So I think that's a really nice touch. I didn't realise that they'd had contact.
The beginning and end of her life isn't much fun.
So we're going to go right back to her early education and her father was enlightened not just in taking money and changing his name, but.
Unusually, he wants to educate his daughters. And he did that himself.
He'd been educated at Cambridge. And although we think Florence is perhaps someone who specialised in maths, actually,
she had started Latin, Greek history, philosophy, modern languages, music as well.
And. She her sister, very much fed sketching, this is a picture from the National Portrait Gallery in 1936 of Florence,
the in the Pink was about 16 and her sister is holding her own sketchbook, whereas Florence is Greek.
It's good enough that later on she helped Benjamin Jowett in his translation of Plato's dialogue.
So she was clearly a very able young woman. And judging by that picture, destined for a fine life, probably as the wife of a rather rich man.
But Florence didn't want to do that. And at 16, she had a mystical experience, her calling that she wasn't destined for a conventional life.
She was deeply religious, which we often brush over.
But I wanted to show this window, which has been commissioned for her two hundredth anniversary in Romsey Abbey.
Stephen Evans drew it to my attention. And I contacted Sophie Hacker, who did it to ask permission to show it.
Show me a High-Quality image and made me promise that I would also say that she's about to have a book come out, which is about the imagery on it.
So although you probably can't see it here in the background, places like Scutari that were very important to her.
There's an owl up there, that baby owl she saved in Athens, apparently very, very keen on birds and source of vomitus.
Franciscan. And that's a quotation from my.
It is I. And she answered. Here I am, Lord. Send me now whatever you make of that.
She went on to do good things, but that state is one of the cause of her life.
So as a young adult, she'd not get marriage. She felt called by God.
She was obviously searching for what she did want today. And by the age of 25,
she'd got into my head that she wants to be a nurse and she wanted to go to
Solsbury Infirmary and she said it was as if I wanted to be a kitchen maid.
And she drew the conclusion, not unreasonably, that only widowhood or poverty would give an educated woman a reason to work.
By 1848, having not been allowed to go into nursing. She actually went tenanted some teaching at the ragged school in Westminster and
I don't know whether it was this one that support threats by Bellette Blakely,
but I suspect it if it wasn't that one, it was very similar and not open to rise to poverty.
This was not the life she'd been accustomed to. But but her family did not like her doing it, but did not want her near those people.
So what was she going to do? Well, a quick whistle stop tour. Her family thought that she needed to travel.
So she went to Egypt and Greece. Was she taken by the classical antiquities?
Not at all. While she was in Germany, she went to a school in Cosworth near Dussel Dorf.
It was a hospital, an orphanage and a school, and it was staffed by Deaconesses, which were trained by the pastor and his wife.
And she really got drawn towards that. And essentially a year later, she went back to Kaisa Worth, again, strong from family opposition.
But by now, she was 30 by this point. She wasn't taking no for an answer.
But when she got back to Britain, she couldn't find an outlet for a training.
So she'd visited hospitals throughout the UK and Europe. She collected information.
She analysed and reflected on hospital reports and government publications and public health, really putting her previous training to really good use.
And then eventually, and I can only imagine her family must have been relieved. She got a job with a good name.
The lady, superintendent of an institution for sick woman number one, upper Harley Street,
which is still where the sort of posher type of medicine takes place.
But the trauma of war came along, and like so many women when the war came along.
She got going. And she went out to the Crimea, which is where she earned the super K, the lady of the lamp.
Now, she did some nursing.
But again, as she'd already been doing, she started thinking and analysing and these graphs are well known amongst statisticians,
but maybe not some of the other of the audience. And they looked at causes of mortality amongst the soldiers from 1854 to 1855.
And then the following year for the same cycle. And the wedges are months.
And what she's got here is a wonderful graphical representation showing that although some of the soldiers were dying from battle,
actually a lot more were dying from infectious diseases, which are much more preventable.
And only a few were dying from other things. And after some interventions, the reason the left hand one is so much on the right hand.
One is that she got those deaths right down.
And if when lockdown reopens, you come to London, the originals of those are in the science museum in the Winton gallery,
and they're well worth seeing because they're just lovely to look at.
And on the strength of that, she was elected a fellow of the Roar's disconcert of what was then the Siskel site of London,
which was the forerunner of the raw Siskel society. You had to be nominated.
She had nominees who included William Farr and William Guy.
William Farr set up the General Register Office.
And it was he who was responsible for taking the essentially way of registering births and deaths through the parishes into a national system,
which is why she her birth was done just sort of on what happened to be there on the church it was registered in.
Whereas by the end, it's a national certificate, you say, and William Guy is went on to be president of the Ross Society.
You founded the guy Medal's which on that panellists were joining me later, have got a goodly collection of between them.
So these were she was supported by some eminent people and a lot of people called William around at that stage, I notice, in passing.
So what else she did she do? And she said she wrote a lot.
Which means that we know a lot about what she thought. I would call her a feminist.
She wouldn't have used that word. It wasn't in currency at that time.
But she was scathing about the education available to women and the limited expectations society had of their role.
She was fuming. The time has come when women must do something more than domestic half, which means nursing the infants,
keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.
Well, I must say, right at the moment, the idea of being allowed to meet people for a good dinner, having an entertaining party is rather nice.
But for me, that would be the icing on the cake.
The expectations of woman of her time was that would be her entire life of ageing, that kind of thing.
She said, why have women, passion, intellect, moral activity, these three and a place in society, what not one of these three can be exercised?
So she really saw it and articulated what was unfair about it.
So I'm just coming forward to memorialise the present day briefly and then we'll go back to carry on with Florence.
How are we doing now? What do these people have in common?
I mean, clearly, they are white men of a certain age, with the exception of this one down here.
And the reason I've got the heroin in there is that. There was some call David Hare I wanted to include, but I couldn't find a picture of,
so the heron from my locked down walks in St James's Park is proudly standing surrogate.
Well, if you don't recognise all of them, the clues, racist society of Presidents board.
They are all previous presidents of the Royal Society and what they have in common.
And you might guess if you know, even two or three of them is that they are all called David and wonderful presidents.
They've been. But if I might, my my three year old grandson likes building towers.
He loves building the historic Hamada's Lego. So if I put these chaps into a tower.
There are six of them. And if I then build another tower with all the female presidents,
even if I include the president elect, Sylvia Richardson will be taking over in January.
There are more presidents called David than there are female presidents.
One hundred and eighty five years.
And I think if I could have found all the pictures of this chap called William, it would have been an even bigger tower.
So my younger grandson is at the stage where if you build a tower, he rolls over the carpet until he manages to knock it down.
I don't want to knock that tower down, but I would like to kind of see a few more women beating this lot.
And if Florence were here with us now and she said, well, OK, that's largely the 20th century,
some of that is taking place in 21st century, what does 21st century statistics look like?
I'd give you this. We've got Crystal Donelli, who you've already met, Jen Rogers, who you're about to meet in the upper left hand corner.
We've got a meeting held last year by several of our sections, including the young substation section, celebrating women in statistics.
I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at it as a fairly new president. Men under the bottom right hand corner.
Just the most wonderful photograph of my friend and colleague Jane Hutton,
who heavily involved in the Ames, which is the African Institute Mathematical Cystectomy.
It's not only women, but that is just such a joyful picture. I just wanted to show it to try to rebalance.
And if anyone in this audience dares to look at these photos and say, oh, I feel a bit uncomfortable in that environment,
just put yourself in the shoes of Florence and some of the women who followed in her footsteps walking into a metal environment.
So things are changing. But what Florence does have in common with I think every woman on that picture is that she was passionate about statistics.
She said statistics is the most important science in the whole world for upon.
It depends. The practical application of every other science and of every art, the one science essential to all political and social ministration,
all education, all organisation based on experience for only gives us the results of our experience.
She really did care about autistics. But there was another facet of Florence that I've got to know as I've been reading more about her.
Those she cared, passionate about education, and we'll look at a bit more of that in a minute.
She also cared about action. She said during the middle portion of her life, college education acquirement of knowledge she longed for.
But that was temporary. Whereas I depart from her slightly, I still think that knowledge for knowledge is sake.
If I could do pure mathematics, at least some of the time, I would just for its own sake.
But Florence really had no time for that. She wanted to set up an institute for training of nurses and hospital attenders,
and she spots supporters to set up the Nightingale Fund for former civil hospitals.
She then kept well clear of it. She didn't get involved as many women of her class would have done in the fundraising itself.
She left others to do that while she got on with campaigning for a full commission
of enquiry into Crimea and Deaths 16000 from disease versus only 4000 from battle.
And she was angry about that. And she wanted things done about its.
So just picking up some of the other things about education.
She had a keen interest in the village elementary school near a family home in Derbyshire.
She wrote about education in schools in British colonies. She was passionate about education, what counties of the poor.
And you can see by her experience in Westminster stood him in good stead for that.
And all the time these themes come through, it should be practical, it should be hands on education, manual skills are prioritised.
And whenever she wasn't happy about anything. Education was part of the answer.
She. As we've seen, was very concerned about British soldiers and she championed their education.
She was a bit scathing about the Army doctors. And again, she thought past that solution was education.
She'd got her followers raising money for the Nightingale School of Nursing.
And when it was set up, she then became much more engaged again.
And she gave detailed instructions that should be taught by practitioners, not by people who were hands off.
And there were things in there that each nurse should have her own room so that she could study it quietly.
And what that meant was her influence spread as graduates took senior roles and went worldwide.
I gave a talk, which I did about Florence in Australia and found that she'd sent she'd never been out there,
but some of her proteges had been out there and set up the way that they were doing things there.
So her influence was phenomenal.
And I think those involved in education know the often the most important thing we do is the future generations that we train.
And Alex Outwell has written a lot about her education, so I'm grateful for that.
And as I said. She was passionate that education is to teach men not to know, but to do.
It's about observation, reflection, training. And she said every five or 10 years really requires a second training nowadays.
Well, nothing could be true. Now, I think the pace we're going at, we could all do the second training.
So who else did she think needed educating? And this is where her relationship with her grandfather comes in because.
Those as a woman, she would not have gone anywhere near Parliament through her grandfather.
I think if I've got it right. Was an MP for best part of four decades.
She knew that politicians didn't always get it right.
And she had a correspondence going with Benjamin Jowett, who was, I think, just three years old on her.
And this wonderful quote, which you've got to imagine it, those of you know, Sheila Byrd need this read in her tone of voice.
Our chief point was that the enormous amount of statistics this moment available at their disposal or in their pigeonholes,
which means not at their disposal, is almost absolutely useless. Why?
Because cabinet ministers, their subordinates, the large majority of whom have received a university education,
have received no education whatsoever on the point upon which all legislation
demonstration must to be progressive and not vibratory ultimately be based.
We do not want a great arithmetical law. We want to know what we are doing and things which must be tested by results.
And I just find that such a powerful image that these highly educated politicians have facts and figures which over venue how to use them,
would help them plan in the running of the country, but they just didn't know how.
And so they're languishing in these pigeonholes. So what was she going to do about that?
The reason she was writing to Benjamin Jamot was that she was well aware that Oxford was the place Stenders,
for that matter, that educates a large number of our politicians. So she thought that Cicek should be introduced into the studies.
University of Oxford. By setting up a professorship of applies to sticks.
And she wanted to address the need for statistics related to education, penology, workhouses and India.
This was not about mathematics and probability theory. This was replication.
At the time, Oxford didn't think it was suitable. They tried to persuade you, I think, to write an essay.
It found an essay prise and strategy, but had nothing to do with it.
And so they missed out.
I have to say that if she came to Imperial saying, what's up, a chair for this kind of purpose, our advance, more people would be leaping at her.
And I'm quite sure in Oxford now,
your development teams would also be quite willing to help anybody who feels minded to fund this because it is still needed.
So what's the equivalent of pigeonholes? Because though we may still have them, they're not.
Now our primary means of communication. And.
Again, when I saw this image, I just it just summed it up for me.
These days we have databases, email accounts full of attachments that we are meant to read, much digest that would help us do our jobs more properly.
But we either don't know how to get in there. Or we don't have the time.
And so that to me is the modern analogue for politicians that it's not necessarily that we're short of data.
Sometimes we're short of good data, but you need the wherewithal to do something useful with it.
And one of the things the Raw Siskel Society has done is to publish its data manifesto.
So whenever there's an election, we send our data manifesto to the candidates and try and get to sign up to it.
It's got 10 recommendations about how to improve data, policymaking, democracy and prosperity of society.
And very often they sign up to say that if they're elected, they'll do some training.
Some of them actually do it. And probably the most potent one that I think Florence would like is that politicians, policy makers,
not professionals working in public services, should be given basic training, data, handling statistics, interpreting evidence.
And she was firmly of the opinion that the main end of system should not be to inform the government as to how many men have died,
but to enable immediate steps to be taken to prevent the extension of disease and mortality.
And. When I use some of this material in my presidential dress last year, that was more or less what I stopped.
In the current climate, I think we can look a bit further. So what are we now doing?
Firstly, modelling. My colleagues Neil Ferguson and a big team includes Crystal got going.
As soon as we identified Kov it and they put out lots of reports.
Report number nine is arguably the most influential, least most talked about,
which was what would happen to cases of hospitalised case of covered if we did nothing.
And this red line here is the surge capacity in hospitals. You can see that it would be wildly exceeded.
And what would it do on to various lockdowns, gestures? And for me, my last day in my office was actually the 16th of March.
On the basis of this report, politicians spoke out. It took them a week later before we probably went into lockdown.
But this is a message that I really don't know what I'm doing coming into work.
And that, of course, was two days before we would use to this lecture on the 18th of March.
It was cancelled, I think, the previous Friday. But I was also delighted when I saw that I wasn't delighted that new hospitals needed building,
but they named them the Nightingale hospitals, and I'm sure that was for the nurses.
But I rather like the idea that it was data modelling that was informing a response.
As it turned out, it wasn't needed. Not me so far as much as we thought it might be.
But I think it was upset, the right call at the time.
And many of us, certainly at Oxford and Imperial, have been collecting data ever since the open air sinks.
Johnson University of Oxford. Collecting lots of data.
But I'm part of the imperial wrapped studies which have collected data now every month since May.
And this you can look at the different regions of the country.
So up in the top left hand corner, we can see in London where the rates weren't too high.
On the up the axis, the top of that is two and a half percent, two percent just underneath it, dirt without flicking this lights on.
So that's 2%. London have never gone anywhere near that, whereas the north west.
Next to it. And I'm Liverpool is my second city. Hit that a while ago, but with severe lockdown and other measures, they've come back down again.
So this kind of data rigorously done on random samples is vital.
As one of the contributing factors to the epidemic, this data was released yesterday.
These data were released yesterday. But the first version was with government last week.
And what's wonderful about this is the team I'm working with,
all sorts of people that I've worked alongside but never worked with properly before, including Crystal.
When we said, who else do we need? Well, we knew we were going to have temporal spatial data.
So let's get Peter take. It was a bit like putting together your fantasy research team.
And what that means is we're doing our mapping properly. This graph shows a month ago the what the rates were doing up to about three percent.
And whereas they've really got the fact there's not so much dark shows that they've gone down between round six,
amount's seven, the on the upper diagonal, kind of the round six isolated to two.
Because there's a lot of activity in the middle of that. And because we've done over a million tests in total, but because of the rates at the moment,
we have enough to do it at local authority level that are three hundred forty six of them.
And that scale, if you can't read on your machine, goes up to four percent.
So there are some little pockets where the rates are heading in that direction, which is really quite worrying.
But it's level of resolution that means that the data could be used to inform actions is the point I'm trying to make.
I'm a tri list. So. You'd expect me to say something about trials.
There've been a lot of trials started, but the three I want to highlight.
Are three what's called platform trials. They're the national priority clinical trials.
The principle trial, which is in high risk patients in primary care, recover in hospital and ring up capping critically ill patient trials.
And the thing to note is that the chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Wales,
Northern Ireland, wrote to say that these are the national priority trials on the 3rd of April.
I mean, if you think how long it normally takes to get trials going.
The idea that we could identify a disease sometime in January and have complicated trials up and
running by April and recovery started recruiting really fiercely straight away is quite phenomenal.
The principle of remap kapper both what's called Bayesian adaptive studies.
They're built on previous work. So the point, again, I'm trying to draw out is that preparedness work matters in all sorts of ways.
And the fact that there were protocols ready to ready to go really meant that we get motoring with us.
I'm not declaring it is not conflict of interest, like the data monitoring committee for the principle trial, which didn't recruit very much early on.
But, my goodness, it's it's. Galloping now.
So we're suddenly having to have at least potentially weekly data monitoring committees in the diary because we're recruiting at over 150 a week.
Justices of snippet remap cap, which is led by my colleague Tony Gordon, has had about 3000 patients randomised.
And it's already shown the height, of course, and steroid treatment improved,
recovering critical patients that moppin of a ton of ERBs, ineffective and provided no additional benefit.
And most recently, to zoom up, which can barely pronounce,
which is not rightest drug gives it an odds ratio of one point eight seven for a better outcome.
And there's a ninety nine point seven five, but it's superior to no immune modulation.
So when they're set up properly, we can get fast answers that are feeding back into the pandemic.
Now. Another area where both Imperial and Oxford are leading the pack, along with various other companies, is vaccines.
When people said to me a few months ago, do you think we'll have vaccines?
I said, well, as far as I knew, corona viruses were extraordinary, different to get vaccines for.
And I wasn't holding my breath. I'm no expert on vaccines, so I don't particularly want to get into the vaccine trials.
But I did want to show this that I saw on Twitter,
which is a so-called Cheverton voice who's not a statistician, but he just said proud husband moment.
My wife has been the lead statistician on the Oxford vaccine trial, working 24/7 since March.
The team has done in 10 months what would normally take a decade to do. Not too early for Publius it then, but the follow up to 80.
His wife had an Angel Murphy, not American. No, I don't know her.
But that to me sounds surrogate for. All the statisticians, all the trials I've shown you.
I can only you can only imagine how hard that imperial team were working for the modelling if they had report nine out by mid-March.
We have had two departments meet here at Imperial.
And people started saying, well, you know, when your department's gonna go back to work, I say, my department have not stopped working.
I have never seen so many people work so hard, such long hours.
And it is truly impressive what science and not just assist experts to six is absolutely at the core of that is done.
So back to. Florence, this picture, you might be wondering what it is.
It's in the dark, and that is actually the House of Commons. That's Big Ben, the Elizabeth Tower over there.
And it's taken from the South Bank, which is where St. Thomas is hospitalist.
And it's actually just people walk round there a couple of hours ago.
But because it's there, there my flat. But unfortunate. I didn't realise they were showing this on Florence's birthday.
So I think it was probably beamed from St. Thomas's.
But I just think it's a wonderful image showing modern nursing alongside nurses of Florence's time.
What I love about it isn't the nursing analogy of our culture that's important.
I just love the idea that Florence is kind of all over those politicians looking at them and saying, OK, so are you doing what you meant to be doing?
Brilliant image. So what does the IRS have been doing?
Because we haven't got Florence do it for us now.
To our March council meeting, which was the first one we had fully online, which was rearranged at a few days notice.
Unsurprisingly, we discussed kov it and what we should do. My initial reaction was my colleagues are doing quite enough.
We don't need any kind of task force. But actually, it was very clear that we did need some coordination.
And I are Sylvia Richardson, who's the incoming president of Spiegelhalter, who is my predecessor to chair it.
And they brought together again a stunning group on designing the data collection, diagnostic studies,
modelling, forecasting treatment studies, enhancement of public understanding and other areas.
And if you want to know more about the work I've left link there. And a lot of this is actually sort of slightly unsung.
They get requests when we put the REACT protocol together over the weekend.
I thought, well, you know, this hasn't got the luxury of peer review,
but we sent it to the Kovar task force and they came back with stunning legal comments.
So, yeah, they they got that study has a great deal.
But if they're important, I know that they're giving advice to government. And David, maybe say more about that.
But what we need to be high profile when we need to do what Florence would have is do we do.
And one of the. Surprising things that we hadn't foreseen came with exams, the exams for 16 year olds and 18 year olds got cancelled.
And I then got a phone call or email from Paula Williamson, who longstanding colleague,
my Never Paul Days, who happens to be married to a teacher and had a couple of lads doing A-levels.
Her twins. And she said, I've just seen the request for schools for what they've got to put in.
And I think there's diskless choose here. What is the RSS done about it?
Well, at that point, we hadn't realised there was fiscal issues because it took some middle ground to flag them up.
But essentially we wrote letters and then when it broke in the summer, we wrote rather more firmly.
And colleagues who know more about educational things, Niger have played a blinder.
But if they wanted to fight in the papers because of Croll said some things that we didn't like.
Yeah, we can have the arguments and headlines.
And equally, I can actually understand why there was a a will to put money into mass testing to try sort things out.
But there are well rehearsed fiscal issues underlying what is essentially screening.
And John Deakes and others wrote on that and the Times pitched up in the front page.
So again, Rosta Society Headline News. So when we need to, I hope that Florence would would appreciate what we're doing.
So what about Florence's legacy? Her correspondence with Benjamin Deryk continued.
And he wrote to her, interestingly,
New Year's Eve 1879 saying that was a great deal of romantic feeling about you 23 years ago when he returned home for the Crimea.
And now you're walking in silence. Nobody knows how many lives are saved by nurse and hospital, how many thousand soldiers are now alive.
Your forethought and diligence.
How many Nita's of India in this generation, generations come and been preserved from famine and oppression by the energy of a sick lady.
You can scarcely rise my back because what I.
Some of you will know, but I didn't mention, is that Florence, after coming back from the Crimea, had some health problem numbers quite short.
But essentially, instead of travelling the globe, she basically took to her room.
So there she is, sick lady, and scarcely writes my bad. The world does not know all this or think about it, but I know it and often think about it.
And I think it was well-meant.
And then I did some songs, I thought when he wrote this, she was 59, which was the age I was when I started my presidency.
It's actually just a lot. It could be right as just a little bit patronising.
But anyway. Roll forward. Benjamin Jamoke died in 1893.
Florence was still going strong in 1996. You can see her in her room.
She's got notebooks. She's got her notebooks. And I came across this this year and I thought I was fading.
Yeah, it's the right thing to do to stay at home. But I thought, gosh, I meant to have been travelling.
I was meant to be coming to Oxford, going to Finland, going to the states, you know,
all sorts of nice things being present about how can I be a president when I'm just stuck in the desk in my bedroom.
But actually, when I saw that, I thought, well, Florence did a huge amount from her room.
She did even more effectively. I think it gave me real courage that, you know, there's more than one way of doing what you need to do.
So at that point. I have haven't even asked that permission.
I have coopted. Preston's past.
The current president and president future to wish Florence a very happy birthday.
And to say that the RSS and statistician's everywhere are trying to follow in her footsteps.
So thank you very much. Oh, thank you very much, Deborah.
That's amazing.