DC Health Histories Project

The DC Health Histories project uses more than a century of DC health statistics to uncover how political decisions, social movements, and local initiatives have shaped the city’s health landscape.

By transforming these statistics into meaningful narratives, we aim to develop a new model for how medical humanities approaches can illuminate the lived consequences of political decisions and advance a more comprehensive, human-centered path to the study of health and society.

Beginning in 1879, DC’s Department of Health has published annual reports detailing births, deaths, and disease trends in the District, producing one of the few historical records that captures the experiences of nearly all the city’s residents. These statistics do more than document public health trends: they serve as lasting traces of lives marked by struggle, resilience, and change.

By digitizing and analyzing this vast collection of data, we seek to identify long-term patterns in health and their relationship to the city’s evolving political and economic landscape.

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Through interactive visualizations, historical research, and community engagement, we will examine how structural conditions—including segregation, urban renewal, and federal interventions—have been written into the health of DC’s communities.

OUR PATH

01_Digitization of Health Statistics

A central task of the project will be the large-scale digitization of the DC Department of Health’s annual reports, which span from 1879 to 1996. These volumes contain tables documenting births, deaths, and communicable diseases, broken down by race, sex, and age. We plan to scan and convert the tables into machine-readable form, validate the figures against the originals, and store them in a structured database. This database will allow the records to be searched, analyzed, and shared widely, turning fragile archival reports into a durable and accessible foundation for research, teaching, and public history.

03_ Website and Publishing Platform

We will build an open-access website at dchealthhistories.org to serve as the home for the project. The site will present the digitized statistics alongside interactive visualizations and long-form essays. It will also provide a space for contributions from other scholars and community partners. Using open-source tools such as Quarto and Observable.js, we plan to design a format that allows readers to move fluidly between narrative explanation and dynamic data displays. The result will be a public-facing platform that makes complex health histories intelligible to a wide audience.

02_Data Stories

Once the statistics are digitized, we will use them to create interpretive “data stories” that bring numbers into conversation with lived experience. Each story will begin with patterns found in the statistics and then draw on archival research, oral histories, and community knowledge to explain those patterns in context. For example, a rise in mortality might be connected to housing displacement, or a change in disease classification might be read alongside the testimony of those who lived through an epidemic. In this way, we plan to pair quantitative records with human voices, producing essays that both analyze and narrate the health histories of DC communities.

04_R Library of Research Tools

To support both transparency and reuse, we will develop an open-source R library of tools for working with the digitized data. This package will contain functions for cleaning, summarizing, and visualizing the statistics, as well as for constructing measures like life expectancy. By documenting our code according to best practices and releasing it through GitHub, we will enable others—scholars, students, and community groups alike—to build on our work. In this way, the technical infrastructure of the project will itself become a resource for future research.

05 _ Public Engagement and Partnerships

Throughout the project we plan to work closely with partners in DC and beyond. We will collaborate with community organizations, educators, and archivists to shape our research questions and to ensure the results are meaningful outside academic circles. Public events, listening sessions, and creative collaborations—such as performances and poetry inspired by the data—will help translate the project’s findings for diverse audiences. Through these activities, we aim to recover the collective memory of DC communities, shed light on the long history of health inequities, and model a justice-oriented approach to the use of health data.

DC Health Histories Project

OUR PATH

01_Digitization of Health Statistics

DC Health Histories Project Inquiry