Burtin’s chart ran first in SCOPE, a quarterly magazine produced by the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo, MI. SCOPE was mailed exclusively to doctors. In 1952 many physicians still worked out of rural offices and often did not regularly receive the latest research information. Upjohn required SCOPE to supply more than data about its own proprietary drugs. This chart accompanied a generic piece.

Describing Burtin’s chart, Xan writes: “It has little communication value except to say ‘Look how cool I am!’ At least all the data is present, so a meticulous reader can get what information he needs.” The second of those sentences is accurate. And it neatly negates the first.

Sixty years on, with desk-top computers rendering full spectrum color, bear in mind that SCOPE was usually limited to two-color printing, as in this chart.

Robert Fripp
Co-author, “Design and Science: the life and work of Will Burtin”
and, full disclosure, his son-in-law.
Published by Lund-Humphries, London; Ashgate, N.Y., (2007)

I made the entry in Graph Builder, which was new in JMP 8. First I had to “stack” the three antibiotics columns into a single column with three levels. Then I used that as a grouping variable. The basic script was

Graph Builder(
Show Control Panel( 0 ),
Variables( Y( :MIC ), Group X( :Antibiotic ) ),
Elements( Points( Y, Legend( 2 ), Jitter( 1 ) ) ));

But that doesn’t include the log scale customization or the dose line customizations.

For this I would add something like a 90% or 95% quantile as the line in your diagram so x% of bacteria have a MIC below that, then the Dr can chose accordingly, given knowledge or ignorance of the gram status of the infection.

In your diagram it is unclear what the horizontal lines are,
I think I would try putting the gram neg & positive status bacteria in separate columns within the boxes.

If you used JMP for these plots would you consider publishing the code?
I am just learning it and looking for good worked exercises .-)

Dave

Data Visualization course at Stanford also worked on the same visualization as an assignment, you can find the submissions here – https://graphics.stanford.edu/wikis/cs448b-09-winter/Assignment1