CONTRIBUTIONS OF MEDICINE TO EARLY SOCIAL STATISTICS

医学对早期社会统计学的贡献

• 批准号: 3374409
• 负责人: MICHAEL J DONNELLY
• 金额: $ 2.55万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1992
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1992-07-01 至 1994-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/3374409
• 关键词: history of life science; human population study; medicine; publications; sociology /anthropology; statistics /biometry; vital statistics

From roughly the 1820s onwards, European societies accumulated masses of statistics about the conditions and activities of their societies. In the succeeding several decades, social statistics was effectively institutionalized, and a distinctive social-statistical reasoning (quite different from the earlier political arithmetic) quickly took shape. The great accomplishment of the early social statisticians was to make familiar for the first time the notion of a population, or system, which produces large-scale regularities imperceptible at the level of its constituent individuals. In the eighteenth century only births and deaths had seemed law-like in the aggregate; in the early nineteenth century, by contrast, statisticians began to perceive a whole new array of apparent "laws of social life." My aim is to reconstruct the distinctive contributions of medicine to the early social statistics. It is well known that physicians were preeminent among early social statisticians, and that the medical tradition of social observation fed in directly to inform statistical investigations. But it is less well understood how medicine contributed to the conceptual development of social statistics. This is the focus of my research. It is important to remember that the early work of social statisticians long preceded the mathematical innovations of the late nineteenth century which created modern statistics; accordingly reconstructing the conceptual foundations of early social statistics means asking how categories and classifications were laid down; what it meant to think statistically; and how regularities and apparent "laws of social life" should be interpreted. By reexamining the play of medical notions in social statistics I hope to open a new way of seeing the history of social medicine, and throw new light on some of the links between medicine and the emergence of the social sciences in the nineteenth century. My research involves a close analysis of a limited number of printed and archival sources. Since I have already done substantial spade-work on the project, it seems to me feasible to complete it in two years.

大约从19世纪20年代开始，欧洲社会积累了大量的 统计他们社会的状况和活动。 在 几十年来，社会统计有效地 制度化，和一个独特的社会统计推理（相当 与早期的政治算术不同）迅速形成。 的 早期社会统计学家的伟大成就是让人们熟悉 第一次提出了人口或系统的概念， 在其组成部分层面上难以察觉的大规模规律性 个体 在十八世纪，只有出生和死亡似乎 总体上是类似法律的;相比之下，在世纪早期， 统计学家们开始发现一系列新的明显的“规律”， 社会生活" 我的目标是重建医学对人类的独特贡献， 早期社会统计。 众所周知，医生是卓越的， 在早期的社会统计学家中， 观察结果直接反馈给统计调查。 但它 不太清楚医学是如何促成 发展社会统计。 这是我研究的重点。 是 必须记住，社会统计学家的早期工作 早于世纪后期的数学创新， 创造了现代统计学;因此重建了概念 早期社会统计学的基础意味着要问分类和 分类已经制定;统计学思考意味着什么;以及 如何解释显而易见的“社会生活规律”。 通过重新审视医学概念在社会统计中的作用，我希望 开启了一种看待社会医学历史的新方式， 医学与社会的出现之间的一些联系 科学在世纪。 我的研究涉及到对有限数量的印刷和 档案来源。 因为我已经做了大量的基础工作， 这个项目，在我看来两年内完成是可行的。