Abstract
IT may seem remarkable that serious attempts to elucidate the mysteries of epidemic disease with the help of mathematical methods should only have been made within the last sixty years, and, even when made, should have been confined to the efforts of a very small number of students. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the school of which Borelli was the most famous exponent endeavoured to bring much less promising medical fields under mathematical cultivation, while Sydenham's exposition of the principia of epidemiology would, one might have thought, have suggested to the founders of our modern calculus of probabilities that here was indeed an opportunity for them. No doubt, howoever, the explanation is to be found in the absence of statistical data, without which mathematical mills are forced to stand idle. It is of interest to recall the fact that the solution of a problem which took its rise in the failure to publish certain detailed statistics reveals a method which might have been generalised. We allude to Daniel Bernoulli's work on smallpox.1
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References
See Todhunter 's â“œHistory of the Theory of Probability,â” p. 225.
Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., 1906, xxvi., 484; ibid., 1911, xxxi., 262.
Journ. Hygiene, 1911, xi., 96; Proc. 17th Inter. Congress Med., 1913, Sect. 18.
â“œAn Application of the Theory of Probabilities to the Study of a priori Pathometry.â” By Lieut.-Col. Sir Ronald Ross. Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 1916, xcii., 204.
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GREENWOOD, M. The Application of Mathematics to Epidemiology . Nature 97, 243–244 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/097243a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/097243a0
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