The first cab off the rank for 2014 is Howard Wainer’s ‘Medical Illuminations: Using Evidence, Visualization & Statistical Thinking to Improve Healthcare’, Oxford University Press, 2014. It costs around $40 Australian.
Dr Wainer has written several great graphics books, including 2005’s ‘Graphic Discovery: a Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures’, Princeton University Press.
The new book has more of a medical theme, including extremely useful chapters on medical prediction, the importance of showing diabetes patients real-time and understandable information on their blood sugar levels, and the over-use of pie charts.
Although not mentioned in the above books, Florence Nightingale, Nursing pioneer and first female Fellow of what was to become the Royal Statistical Society, developed and used graphs and charts (admittedly an early form of pie chart). Ms Nightingale used such graphs to clearly show Queen Victoria, who wasn’t a statistician and wouldn’t have appreciated heaps and heaps of tables, the very real problems that soldiers were facing in the Crimean War due to poor sanitation.
Since then, much medical data is routinely collected and statistically analysed, but there is still a long way to go in terms of portraying and illuminating that information to medical staff and the patients and carers themselves. Books like Medical Illuminations, supplemented by general info on the ‘how’ of graphic presentation using readily available software (Wainer’s texts focus mainly on the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’), will help to achieve such an important goal.
Recommended, for non-statisticians and statisticians alike!
Oxford University Press website: http://www.oup.com.au/titles/academic/medicine/9780199668793
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