How Data Visualization During Public Health Crises Has Saved Lives for Centuries

When publicized far and wide enough, infographics, some experts argue, can save lives. The communicative value in visualizing data towards improving public health outcomes is long-established, going back over two centuries. And while the earliest examples were intended to inform discussion and debate among an elite social sphere, they also sought to address real-world problems. From 1820 to 1830, an enthusiasm for statistics began to emerge across the western world, leading to an era of statistics concerned with reform. It was led by individuals who sought to disrupt what they saw as the chaos of politics and replace it with a new apolitical regime of empirical, observed fact. This new approach would come to be seen as a field of action, as an applied science, providing empirical weight to the new, intellectually dominant spirit of political economy. Following the creation of the General Register Office (GRO) in 1837, the first wave of statistical enthusiasm was applied to poverty and to the lived environment of the poor; the progressives who undertook these surveys did so in the legal context of the reforming acts of the early 1830s. Separate from (but at the same time, often socially or professionally connected to) the governments of this era, a network of liberal-minded, reforming individuals hailing from business and professional classes busied themselves in statistical pursuits. Within a few years, in the capital and in the major cities of the industrial north, a series...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 health Public Health syndication Source Type: news