Shared history of health and data visualization

- [Instructor] Now I know that we're all here to learn about modern technology and healthcare, but it helps if we have a very short history lesson first. And there's two people I want to introduce to you, although, you're probably familiar with both of 'em already. One is John Snow and the other is Florence Nightingale, both from England in the 1800s. First off, John Snow. He was an English physician, a medical doctor, and he lived from 1813 to 1858. And he was a leader in the medical hygiene movement, as well as the use of anesthesia. And he's usually considered the founder of modern epidemiology. And a lot of this can be traced back to a single episode, that there was an outbreak of cholera in London in 1854, and he had the insight to find out what was going on and come up with a rather simple solution. And what he did is he created this map you see here on the right. It's a map of the area where people were dying in London, and he put a little mark for each person who died in their physical location. Let's zoom in on that a little bit. And what you see here is right in the middle is BROAD STREET and you see an awful lot of black lines representing a lot of deaths right there. And also, right at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, he has marked a pump. This was a public water pump, and unfortunately, the water was bad, but is what people used for drinking water, so they would pump the water, they would drink it, they would get cholera, and many of them would die. The solution was really simple. He took the handle off the pump, so it was no longer possible to pump water from it. And that according to most versions of the story contributed to the sudden decrease of cholera in this particular outbreak. Also, it was a fabulous way of using visual analytics and publicly available data to solve an important healthcare issue. The next person I want to talk about is Florence Nightingale, who was an English nurse from 1820 to 1910. Now, in addition to being a nurse, she was a social reformer, she was a statistician, she was a person of tremendous influence and is also considered the founder of modern nursing. And one of her best known projects was an analysis of mortality or causes of death for British soldiers in Crimea. In this one, she's simply referring to it as the Army in the East. Now, Nightingale called this particular kind of graph a Coxcomb, but it's more commonly known as a Polar Area Diagram, or, in honor of her, a Nightingale Rose Diagram. And it shows that acute infectious diseases, what she called Preventable or Mitigable Zymotic diseases, which are shown in blue, accounted for a much larger number of deaths than wounds, which are in red, or all other causes, which are in black. And what this let you know is that, well, the risks of warfare, the actual injuries incurred are one thing, but it was the healthcare and the infections that resulted which were a much more significant issue. Now, this work and other related projects that she did had a major influence on hygiene in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. And her work was a substantial part of the massive improvement in life expectancy between 1874 and 1935. Also, she really is one of the founders of data visualization, which is a major part of data science as a way of exploring data. In fact, the Data Visualization Society has a journal they published that is simply called "Nightingale," in honor of her contributions, tracing back primarily to this chart. Now, I give you this historical context of John Snow and Florence Nightingale of letting you know that the use of data driven methods, and in this case, data visualization methods, to answer questions about healthcare, medicine, and public health have a long and important history. And it's in that context that the rest of our presentations take place.