TB Gets Historical Print Award

Wasting a lot of time, indeed, with the Google Ngram Viewer—as predicted today by Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline. My graphic survey (below, from 1800 to 2000), based on the number of word prints in Google's ever-expanding book collection, concerns infectious diseases. The far-and-away frontrunner (although the percentage of mentions is still far below 1% in the company's collection) is TB (green line), peaking before 1920. The second runner-up is syphilis (red). "Human immunodeficiency virus" (purple) is provided for a sense of scale and timing. The other diseases (if you, like me, can't read them in this compressed image format) are malaria (yellow), smallpox (dark blue), and polio (light blue).


* I added all sorts of other infectious disease names--including "gonorrhea," "measles," "mumps," "rubella," "diphtheria," "streptococcus," "varicella," etc--and they didn't rank very highly, so I left them out of the graph to avoid crowding. The biggies, like TB, syphilis, and malaria, are shown.