How did humans die in the 20th century? And which were the worst killers?shows the way we passed

Information is Beautiful on how we die

What were the greatest causes of death in the 20th century, our "worst century"? War? Disease? Natural disasters? You might be surprised.

We gathered and examined mortality data from around the world – from disease to murder to mudslides – then calculated and visualised what killed the most people.

The result was a 6m x 2m visualisation art-piece for the Wellcome Collection's free London exhibition,'Death: A Self-Portrait – The Richard Harris Collection'. Now released online for your morbid fascination.

Download a free hi-res PDF of this image

The Data

See it all in this dataset: http://bit.ly/20thDeath.

Data involves rounding, broad estimation and ball-park estimates.

There is also some inevitable double-counting which we've marked on the dataset.

We used a regression algorithm on some figures to roll back current mortality figures to the beginning of the 20th century.

Sources

WHO Mortality report (PDF) & app, WHO Global Burden of Disease (PDF), OECD Mortality Stats

Concept & design & research

David McCandless

Lead researcher: Miriam Quick,

Additional research: Ella Hollowood, Pearl Doughty White, Daniel Hampson, Andrew Key

Regression algorithm: Laurin Janes

Art direction: Kathryn Ariel Kay

Additional design: Tatjana Dubovina, Piero Zagami, Peter Ayres, Paulo Estriga

About Us



We are InformationIsBeautiful.net, dedicated to visualising information, ideas, stories and data. Twitter @infobeautiful. The updated 2nd Edition of our book of infographic exploria, is called Information Is Beautiful. (HarperCollins 2012). In the US, the book's called The Visual Miscellaneum . It's published in nine other languages.

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