what has gone before

Data visualisation has a longer history in medicine than we might imagine. John Snow plotted cholera cases on a map in 1854, such that the visualisation of his data enabled him to decipher the most important pattern - all of the cases centred around the same pump on Broad Street.

Florence Nightingale also drew images to represent her data, so that the patterns relating to mortality became clear to see.

Florence Nightingale’s diagrams depicting mortality in the British Army

As both John Snow and Florence Nightingale showed us, visualising our data not only allows us to aid communication, it can also deepen our understanding of the data and inform analysis.