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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    least a good many of the items of the present table. More than this in the way of agreement among scholars on a historic matter it is doubtless idle to hope for. In the second place it should be said that if the sources chosen for statement of reference as to the facts are obviously in some cases second-hand, and perhaps somewhat casual, this is so of deliberate purpose. It is hoped that by so choosing them it may perchance be possible to entice an unwary student or so to do a little reading about the men who have helped to develop modern statistics. I am quite sure that this will not happen if he is referred straight off to a ponderous and deadly “Geschichte der Statistik.” Nor is there much chance that the embryo health-officer or medical man would make anything but heavy weather if he essayed a voyage into the “Theorie analytique.” But if he will read the article in the En- cyclopedia Britannica on Laplace he will tend to have a measure of wholesome respect for a great man, and will know a little at least of what that man meant in the history of science. CAPTAIN JOHN GRAUNT Vital statistics, in the modern sense of the term, may be said to take its origin from the publication, in 1662, of a remarkable book for any age, but particularly so for that time, entitled, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality, by John Graunt, Citizen of London (1620-1674). Bills of mortality, consisting of lists of burials, marriages, and baptisms, had been compiled by the parish clerks for upward of a century before Graunt’s time, but no one before him had conceived the idea of making an analytical study of these observations to the end of determining the basic laws of human mortality, natality, and movement of population. From his inadequate and meager material, as measured by present standards, Graunt successfully demonstrated four of the most important facts which the study of vital statistics to this day has disclosed. First, he made clear the regularity of certain vital phenomena which appear to be merely the play of chance in their individual occurrence. Second, he first pointed out the excess of male over female births, and the approximately equal numbers of
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