Forgotten Rationales ... ?
"One of the earliest attempts to systematically classify disease began with John Graunt’s mid-seventeenth-century examination of London’s Bills of Mortality (1939[1662]). London’s series of bubonic plague outbreaks in the first half of the seventeenth century served as the backdrop for Graunt’s statistical analysis. His primary objective was to develop a more comprehensive picture of London’s mortality in order to construct a disease-incident baseline from which to better understand the effects of plague, which tended to overshadow other causes of death. Essential to these objectives were the broader concerns for creating "population profiles through a study of causes of death" (Alter and Carmichael 1999, 121), which Graunt accomplished by estimating London’s population through a geographical analysis, allowing him to calculate crude mortality rates." p.96. | |
UK coronavirus: care providers allegeCare operators warn coronavirus may | "Sydenham designed his nosology with the needs of the physician rather than those of the statistician in mind. Accordingly, Sydenham and Graunt produced different classification systems based on the distinct purposes for which they were intended. This distinction (clinical vs. demographic) played a more significant role in the nineteenth century, foreshadowing some of the tensions and cross-purposes that informed the development of modern classification systems. As Alter and Carmichael (1999, 121) note: 'The problematic relationship between causes of morbidity and causes of mortality thus presented an ideological barrier between the concerns of physicians and the interests of statisticians. ...one group were lumpers, the other splitters.'" p.97. |
Beemer, Jeffrey Keith, "Social Meanings of Mortality: The Language of Death and Disease in 19th Century Massachusetts" (2011). Open Access Dissertations. 428.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/428
https://twitter.com/h2cm/status/1250405469929328647?s=20
Forgotten Streams ...