KDE: 1854 LONDON CHOLERA OUTBREAK

Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), also known as a "heatmap," is a wonderful way to graphically convey epidemiological data for outbreaks of infectious disease. At a glance, one can discern likely points of origin, routes of transmission, and density by area. KDE maps are attractive and fairly easy to render in QGIS, but it can be exceedingly difficult to obtain spatial point data, which is necessary for creating the nodes used by the software to model density. For this KDE, the underlying raster image is John Snow's original 1854 map, with vector overlays of spatial point data showing water pumps and cholera deaths. The proportional mortality is most densely concentrated around the Broad Street pump (the source of infection as deduced by John Snow). For proper viewing, click HERE to enlarge.

Density radius: 30m
Decay rate: 0
Cell size X,Y: ~1,1
Global transparency: 20%
Pseudocolor

Snow's original map is available in a high resolution format here:
 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Snow-cholera-map-1.jpg

Unfortunately I did not bookmark the site which offered the spatial point data for download, but if I can locate it again, I'll be sure to give appropriate credit here.

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POX

I'm through about 25% of Deborah Hayden's book, POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. Thus far, the work is riveting. Competing theories on the biological evolution and epidemiology of syphilis are weaved throughout a cogent narrative, flavored with notable excerpts from historical records. Apart from the Great Mortality, I can't think of another disease which was so widely personified by poetic mythos and dark imagination as was syphilis. Consider this lurid description by 19th Century French poet Théophile Gautier:

"There is a splendid American pox here, as pure as at the time of Francis I. The entire French army has been laid up with it; boils are exploding in groins like shells, and purulent jets of clap vie with the fountains in the Piazza Navona . . . tibias are exfoliating in extoses like ancient columns of greenery in a Roman ruin . . . lieutenants walking in the streets look like leopards, they are so dotted and speckled with roseola, freckles, coffee-colored marks, warty excrescences, horny and cryptogamic verruccae and other secondary and tertiary manifestations which appear here after a fortnight." [1]

1. Hayden, Deborah. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. Basic Books, New York: 2003. Quoting Claude Quétel: History of Syphilis (1990).

MY FRIEND DAHMER

Cleveland's own Derf Backderf has penned a new graphic novel which is certain to draw the interest of those fascinated by psychology and serial killers alike. My Friend Dahmer reflects upon Derf's own interactions with an adolescent Jeffrey Dahmer, the latter's growing pains, and the horrific consequences of human frailty. 

"MY FRIEND DAHMER is the haunting, new graphic novel by Derf Backderf, an award-winning cartoonist and comix creator. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of the iconic monster who he shared the same school hallways, cafeterias, libraries, and compulsive car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling helplessly against the ghastly urges bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche. The Dahmer recounted here, universally regarded as an inhuman monster by the rest of the world, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid who is sucked inexorably into madness while the adults in his life fail to notice. 

 We all know what Dahmer did, but in MY FRIEND DAHMER, Backderf provides, from his unique vantage point, profound (and at times, even strangely comic) insight into how, and more importantly, why Jeffrey Dahmer transformed from a high school nerd into a depraved fiend as notorious as Jack the Ripper. 

In MY FRIEND DAHMER, Derf comes as close as anyone yet has to explaining the seemingly unexplainable phenomenon of one Jeffrey Dahmer, Revere High School, Class of 1978."

You can pre-order a copy HERE.

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A VIKING MYSTERY

Quite an interesting find on the Oxford grounds. It's fortunate when such archaeological discoveries can be corroborated by written historical accounts.

A Viking Mystery


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10 BIZARRE MEDICAL ANOMALIES

Top 10 Bizarre Medical Anomalies

No doubt some readers will be familiar with certain conditions on this list, while a couple might present an intriguing surprise. My own anthropology research has/is focused on osteology, so I find Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva particularly fascinating. This is essentially a condition where the body never shuts down the ossification process, eventually resulting in complete skeletonization of "soft" bodily tissues. I can only imagine how painful and terrifying it must be to live with such a condition.


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JACK THE RIPPER: MODUS OPERANDI

It speaks to the exceptionality and mythos of this case that there are still new journal articles analyzing it, over 120 years later.

The Jack the Ripper Murders: A Modus Operandi and Signature Analysis of the 1888–1891 Whitechapel Murders (Full .PDF journal article)

ABSTRACT: A number of females, commonly recognized as 11 victims, were murdered in separate events in Whitechapel, London between 1888 and 1891. An evaluation of the murders revealed that six of those murders were linked by a number of distinct, personal signature characteristics, including picquerism, overkill, incapacitation, domination and control, open and displayed, unusual body position, sexual degradation, mutilation, organ harvesting, specific areas of attack, preplanning and organization, and a combination of signature features. The signature characteristics observed in these infamous Jack the Ripper murders were compared to a 1981–1995 cohort of 3359 homicide cases from Washington State’s HITS database. The analysis revealed that the signature displayed in six of the Whitechapel murders was extremely rare. There were only six records of female victims, one a prostitute, with probed, explored, or mutilated body cavities. There were only two cases, both females who were not prostitutes, where the body was left in an unusual position and body cavities were explored, probed, or mutilated. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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