But today every professional interacts with data and charts, be it by poring over a spreadsheet, watching a PowerPoint presentation or reading a newspaper.
For his part Roosevelt is shown as perilously indecisive, poring over opinion polls and “waiting to be pushed into war”, as he told his treasury secretary.
Luc De Nil, of the University of Toronto, has been poring over stutterers' brains using positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging.
When he wasn't doing his own work, he was poring over enormously thick volumes with names like The Handbook of Hippogriff Psychology and Fowl or Foul? A Study of Hippogriff Brutality.