In the early nineteen-eighties, a group of British epidemiologists at the University of Southampton compiled a grimly detailed atlas of the common causes of death in various parts of England and Wales. The atlas comtained page after page of maps for everything from cirrhosis of the liver (most common in industrial areas) to automobile accidents (drivers in the countryside are the most at risk). One of the maps, charting heart disease, proved difficult to interpret. Heart disease, the leading killer in the Western world, is considered a rich person’s illness: rates tend to rise as a society becomes more affluent. But, on this map, the poorer areas of England, in the north and west, were predominantly red, indicating higher than average death rates; the prosperous south and east, including London, were overwhelmingly green, indicating below-average death rates.

Read more: Small and Then — The New Yorker

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