For those, like me, who find the writing style somewhat annoying, this is the part of the article that relates directly to the title: > Imagine the situation F

For those, like me, who find the writing style somewhat annoying, this is the part of the article that relates directly to the title: > Imagine the situation Florence Nightingale confronted in the Crimea. Everyone knew that, in a war, soldiers get shot. Everyone knew that people who are shot tend to die. What they didn't know was that the vast majority of deaths in the Crimean War weren't caused by wounds at all -- they were caused by diseases like cholera and typhus. Thus military leaders didn't implement the basic sanitary precautions in field hospitals and military barracks that would save lives by stopping the spread of disease. > Florence Nightingale saw the problem, but she needed her own ammunition. So she counted the dead, collected the data, and displayed it in a polar area diagram. > It was a credible, clear and compelling display of the causes of death. And suddenly the problem was no longer too abstract to ignore. It was fixable. > That is how a woman -- a nurse -- took on the top brass of the British military and won.