2023-09-24 17:57:24
By Soline Roy
Published 1 hour ago, Updated 1 hour ago
Left: smallpox curves in Manchester (solid line) and St. Marylebone (dotted) from 1862 to 1864, published by Arthur Ransome in “The Scientific Uses of the Notification of Disease” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine , 1911). Right: curves show the succession of different epidemics: smallpox, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever. Arthur Ransome
MEDICINE STORIES – In the middle of the 19th century, a Manchester doctor, Arthur Ransome, discovered that if we wish to understand the course of epidemics and the laws that govern them, we must compile the observations carried out by numerous caregivers, recorded according to the same standards.
They are made of peaks and troughs, leading us from plateaus to rebounds. They beg the world to flatten them by drawing the human dramas currently playing out or to come. Whether you watched or fled from these waves which overwhelmed the media during the Covid pandemic, they have become an essential public health tool. These are the epidemic curves, which took off in the middle of the 19th century, notably under the pen of Arthur Ransome, a doctor in Manchester.
Ransome did not invent the graphical representation of data. Before him, and among many others, William Playfair, an economist-engineer who became a journalist, blackmailer and revolutionary in the Paris of 1789, had given birth to the pie chart, curves and bars. A century later, the British nurse Florence Nightingale showed, thanks to a “diagram on the causes of mortality in the armies of the East” that soldiers died far more from preventable illnesses than from injuries…
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