I am almost done cleaning the almshouse data – the past few days have been spent tracking down the “admittors” – those men (and they were mostly men) who were responsible for sending the destitute and sick of New York to the Bellevue Almshouse. These men were recorded in the almshouse register in the column “by whom sent” and I’ve long been interested in how the identity of the sender related to other aspects of Bellevue admittants. Was one admittor likely to flag one disease more than another? Send patients to one public health site over another? Were admittors from different wards more or less likely to send people in their districts to Bellevue?
I’ve just finished processing the “by whom sent” data, and while more work remains to be done, I thought I’d share a visualization that correlates the person responsible for dispatching inmates to the almshouse, and the reason they were sent: The selection columns on the right and left allow filtering by disease.
Up next: mapping admissions by ward.
