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International Journal of Epidemiology 2001;30:1252-1253
© International Epidemiological Association 2001

Reprints and Reflections

Commentary: ‘Medical art’ versus ‘medical science’: J Civiale's statistical research on conditions caused by calculi at the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1835

U Tröhler

Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Stefan-Meier-Str. 26, Freiburg, Germany.

This report1 results from an in-depth study of a subject considered sufficiently important by the Paris Académie des Sciences to warrant commissioning some members to introduce a formal debate. This was also a normal procedure in the much younger Académie Royale de Médecine, which was founded in 1820. The Civiale report, published on 5 October 1835, must be seen in the context of a contest in contemporary French medical literature about the applicability of ‘statistics' to medicine.

The issue had been launched in a theoretical way in France by the mathematicians Condorcet and LaPlace in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries. Their successors were now reviving their ideas about probabilistic theory: Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781–1840), . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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