Vital Accounts
Vital Accounts
This study examines the pre-history of statistics in eighteenth-century England and France, before state governments and other institutions began to collect statistical data on a regular basis. Eighteenth-century political and medical arithmeticians developed a variety of useful techniques to measure health and population. This book highlights the history of numerical tables, as new scientific instruments, and explains how they were used to evaluate smallpox inoculations, and the health and size of populations.
Reviews & endorsements
"An excellent overview of a vital, though hitherto neglected , dimension of eighteenth-century history." The International History Review
"the wide range of issues raised by the author, and her ability to contextualize the complex web of interactions among science, institutions and social processes and to refute simplistic and essentialist views on 'the power of numbers', makes this a valuable contribution on the genesis of social statistics that any historian will benefit from reading." - Paul-Andre Rosental
"Rusnock's book will be of value to historians of medicine and quantification as well as to those interested in the sociology of knowledge and the history of sceince and its social context more generally. Of particular interest is her comparative focus, which allows the book to escape an oversimplified view that sees scientific innovations such as quantification succeeding largely because they were 'right'. The different trajectory of medical quantification in these two countires--so well described by Rusnock--is a powerful argument in favor of a more complex and multitextured explanation, one that can take into account the important differences in the communities of researchers who first used numbers to measure the health and vitality of populations." - Joshua Cole, University of Michigan
Product details
February 2009Paperback
9780521101233
272 pages
229 × 152 × 17 mm
0.43kg
53 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. A new science: political arithmetic
- Part I. Smallpox Inoculation and Medical Arithmetic:
- 2. A measure of safety: English debates over inoculation in the 1720s
- 3. The limits of calculation: French debates over inoculation in the 1760s
- 4. Charitable calculations: English debates over the inoculation of the urban poor, 1750–1800
- Part II. Medical Arithmetic and Environmental Medicine:
- 5. Medical meteorology: accounting for the weather and disease
- 6. Interrogating death: disease, mortality and environment
- Part III. Political Arithmetic:
- 7. Count, measure, compare: the depopulation debates
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index.
