User:Hugh Small/sandbox

This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working-class homes (see Statistics and Sanitary reform, below)

In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. She later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

The Royal Sanitary Commission of 1868 presented Nightingale with an opportunity to press for compulsory sanitation in working-class homes. She lobbied the minister responsible (James Stansfeld) to strengthen the proposed Public Health Bill to require landlords of existing properties to pay for connection of existing houses to mains drainage [letter to H Verney]. The strengthened legislation was enacted in the Public Health Acts of 1874 and 1875. At the same time she combined with the retired sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick to persuade Stansfeld to devolve power to enforce the law to Local Authorities, eliminating centralised control by medical technocrats [lambert]. Her Crimean War experience and statistics had convinced her that non-medical approaches were most effective given the state of knowledge at the time. Historians now believe that both drainage of homes and devolved enforcement were crucial in increasing national life expectancy by 20 years between 1871 and the mid-1930s during which time medical science had no solution to the most fatal epidemic diseases [szreter, small].