Hive Health

A few months ago, a new programme called Ngram Viewer graduated from Google labs. This tool, which sits within Google books, allows you to see how often phrases have occurred in the world’s books over the years. Google have digitalised over 15 million books, that’s almost 12% of all books ever published. With Ngram viewer you can now graph the occurrence of phrases up to five words in length from the year 1400 through to 2008 across 5.2 million books. With the Ngram Viewer you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years and rapidly quantifying cultural trends.

There are lots of different things you can check but you need to careful when interpreting your results. Experts warn that some effects are due to changes in the language we use to describe things (such as ‘The Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). Others are due to actual changes in what interests us (‘slavery’ peaks during the Civil War and again during the era of the Civil Rights movement.)

So what can the Ngram viewer tell us about healthcare? Well it seems that the words ‘doctor’ and ‘hospital’ have had a similar cultural presence from 1800 to the present day. In comparison the use of the word ‘patient’ has steadily increased with a massive boost post-1950.  Most interesting is the word ‘health’, which had a huge cultural presence in the 1600s followed by a dramatic slump in the early 1700s. It’s been increasing ever since.

Go and try the tool yourself, or have a look at what other people have searched for on the Ngrams Tumblelog.