ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses selected graphics depicting smallpox epidemics created in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, examining some of the historical and cultural factors that influenced their creation. It argues that rather than adhering to established visual genres for representing quantitative information, which only began to emerge in the early nineteenth century the creators of these early depictions engaged in three rhetorically driven tasks—correlation, location, and value—that facilitated and shaped risk perception in the field of public health and epidemiology. The creation of early statistical graphics in the fields of medicine, public health, and epidemiology demonstrates this progression and represents a problem-solving approach that responds to social, cultural, and political issues related to the spread of communicable and infectious disease, investigating smallpox epidemics, and communicating the risks of infection. The chapter also discusses risk perception and assessment and outlines the origins of statistical graphics in medicine.
