FEW would deny the effectiveness of maps as a way of visualising data. In Disease Maps, Tom Koch celebrates their value in charting illness, and how over the years this has improved medical practice.
From the first mappings of plague and yellow fever, through the well-trodden cholera outbreak in Soho, London, during the 1850s, to the spread of the H1N1 flu virus and the computational forecasts that went with it, the book crams in what seems like the entirety of medical cartography.
The sheer weight of stories and the comprehensiveness of the evidence backing them up gives them the flavour…
