100 Objects That Shaped Public Health

September 16, 2016 10:59 AM

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has compiled a list of 100 objects that shaped public health, from the obvious (vaccines) to the less-so (horseshoe crab). Click the three parallel lines at the top right of the pictures to see the list in word form. (via Kottke)
posted by Etrigan (4 comments total)

This is v cool.

(However perhaps a bit churlish but how many of the recent spate of "in 100 objects" expos / books / programmes credit Ian Mcgregor's amazing "History of the world in a 100 objects" for the British Museum which was the originator of the trend, I believe.)
posted by melisande at 11:31 AM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Public health, bitches. It's what keeps most of you alive.
posted by Mental Wimp at 12:48 PM on September 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Wow, this is cool. I had no idea about horseshoe crabs and limulus amebocyte lysate. Brilliant!

I have to admit that when I saw "horseshoe crabs" I was really wondering if it was going to be about "the horseshoe crab data", which is a now-classic dataset in biostatistics, epidemiology, etc. that is used in so many textbooks and tutorials to illustrate data analysis techniques for count data (e.g., Poisson regression). That is sort of important for public health, but LAL is way, way more important.
posted by mean square error at 6:05 PM on September 16, 2016

I'd kinda like to have the same amount of text covering the top 10. I see where they're going with Recycling, but it kinda pales next to vaccines and flush toilets.
posted by wotsac at 9:04 PM on September 16, 2016