Florence Nightingale (1820 - 1910) heroine of the Crimean War, Patron Saint of Nurses, admirer of Quetelet, and champion of the scientific, i.e. statistical, study of society.

To Nightingale every piece of legislation was an experiment in the laboratory of society deserving study and demanding evaluation. This is illustrated by a letter she wrote to Francis Galton in 1891 proposing a professorship in social statistics at Oxford. Galton's response was positive except that he suggested quite reasonably that tenured professors with their comfortable sinecure are lazy and it would be preferable to fund readers positions for 5 year appointments instead. The text of the letter makes a compelling case for social science statistical analysis and would make a compelling grant proposal for modern times. A pdf version of the letter is linked here. The original source is volume 2 of Karl Pearson's Life of Galton,