Each year, the American Heart Association compiles statistics that tell how cardiovascular disease impacts the lives of people in the United States and around the world. This massive, multi-month effort requires a team of experts to produce a book-sized report covering so many topics that it requires chapter headings.
But it didn’t start like that. Almost 100 years ago, it started with just one woman. As much as she loved playing baseball, she was a woman who loved playing with numbers.
Jessamyn Whitney, who authored the earliest statistical report on heart disease mortality found in the AHA archives, followed her father to a baseball game in upstate New York and built a small car so she could have a place to sit. I grew up carrying around a rocking chair. Old newspaper articles tell of a young baseball-loving math genius whose dual passion led to an internationally recognized career as a statistician and a hobby in sports analysis, long before the term was coined. It is drawn.
Dr. Seth Martin, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and chair of the AHA’s 2024 statistical update released Wednesday, was fascinated by Whitney’s pioneering work in both fields. He noted that her first statistical report for the AHA, published in 1927, included mortality data on heart disease, tuberculosis, cancer and pneumonia and was 30 pages long. .
“I was very intrigued that this was a single-author report,” he says. “Currently, we have a very large committee producing documents, and the documents are hundreds of pages long.
“It was really incredible to do this all by myself in this era when modern computing didn’t exist,” Martin said. “I’m trying to imagine all these graphs and all the manual work that was required to compile all the numbers. It seems certain that she was a truly remarkable woman.”
Whitney was a woman who experienced many firsts. She was reportedly the first woman to drive a car in Puerto Rico. She was the first and only woman chosen to represent the United States at the decennial International Conference on the Classification of Causes of Death in Paris in 1929.
Whitney studied mathematics and economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1905. She briefly worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, and in 1918 she became a statistician for the National Tuberculosis Association, where she worked for 22 years. Several years passed before she suffered a fatal heart attack at her desk in 1941.
Her work at the AHA came after the two health agencies created what a 1926 National Tuberculosis Association report called a “plan of cooperation,” during which they shared office space, staff, and funding. We briefly considered a shared merger.
Similar to the AHA’s current statistical update, the Whitney’s earlier report ranked causes of death and found heart disease topping the list. Not much has changed, Martin says. He came across Whitney’s work while conducting research for the AHA’s statistical update commemorating his 100th anniversary.
His interest was further piqued when he searched for Whitney’s name online and found a photo of her in a baseball uniform. Whitney became so famous for his baseball box score analysis that he was invited to umpire a charity game in 1914.
“She has gained a lot of experience compiling statistics for baseball players and teams and predicting winners,” Martin said. Whitney analyzed statistics in her free time when she wasn’t conducting social research on who died from tuberculosis and why.
“These skills made her uniquely qualified to produce these statistics for the American Heart Association,” Martin said.
Whitney’s early research didn’t just provide interesting facts about mortality from heart disease, he said. It likely helped shape the AHA’s mission, as did the reports that evolved into the extensive analyzes produced today.
“Essentially, you can think of the statistical document as the heart and soul of the AHA,” Martin said. “It shows how things change from year to year and where AHA should invest and prioritize from an advocacy and research standpoint. It’s an important guide.”
The first person to make it shine was Jessamyn Whitney.
