Visualizing Health and Healthcare Data

Chapter OneHealth and Healthcare Data Visualizations of Historical Importance

Even before modern-day visualization research validated the direct and powerful relationship between the way information is presented and the way we see and understand it, pioneering healthcare statisticians and caregivers like John Snow (1813–1858) and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) understood that visual display could be a highly effective method for grasping and communicating the messages buried in data. No one who has ever taken an epidemiology course can forget Dr. John Snow's classic work, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. By mapping the London street addresses of residents who had become sick (and in many cases died) and their distance from City water pumps, Snow could visually and effectively communicate the relationship between a single pathogen-tainted water source and the homes of people who contracted the disease. Most people who had fallen ill, it turned out, lived near the Broad Street pump. Snow persuaded the town council to remove the pump's handle, and the outbreak abated.

In 1868, British nurse Florence Nightingale—distressed by the alarmingly high mortality rates in the Crimean War—began to compile statistics on causes of death. Her analysis revealed that of the 900,000 soldiers who died during the war—more than half of 1,650,000 combatants from all countries involved—most ...