Introduction to medical biometry and statistics / by Raymond Pearl.

  • Raymond Pearl
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Introduction to medical biometry and statistics / by Raymond Pearl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    second purpose in cases where, because of the multiplicity of the cause groups involved in the determination of the event, and the consequently small effect of each, it was impossible to make any reasonable prediction regarding an individual from an examination of that individual alone. Such employment might be considered legitimate, though not very fruitful, on the ground that any pre- diction so made, uncertain and doubtful as it may be, is after all perhaps better than no prediction at all. As time has gone on, however, there has been an increasing tendency to assume that this use of the statistical method has general a priori validity and can be profitably employed in all sorts of cases. This leads us to consider carefully the general question of the validity, on the one hand, and the usefulness, on the other hand, of this whole second mode of employment of the statistical method. It is the one which has attracted the greatest attention because of its essentially spectacular nature coupled with a sort of mysteriousness bordering upon the miraculous. It seems a wonderful, indeed almost a superhuman, accomplishment to be able to say in the manner of the oracles of old, “So many men will commit suicide next year.” Since Clerk-Maxwell introduced statistical modes of reasoning into physical science there has been an ever-increasing tendency to regard the universe as organized on a statistical plan. This has come, by gradual evolution, to carry with it two implications, one of which seems quite fallacious and the other partly so. The first of these is that the individual events, of which all the causes are not precisely known to us, are indeterminate. Such an assumption is, of course, unwarranted. Because we do not know all the causes leading to a particular event does not mean that that event is any less precisely determined by the course of ante- cedent events. Consider a box containing 100 consecutively num- bered cards. Suppose one card were to be drawn and that it bore the number 36. It would be quite impossible to formulate pre- cisely all the causes which led to the drawing of the number 36 on the particular occasion considered, but it is equally impossible to conceive that this particular drawing was not definitely “caused.” In other words, there clearly was a whole train of antecedent cir- cumstances, which taken all together definitely resulted, and could
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