Technical Knowledge in American Culture: Science, Technology and Medicine since the Early 1800s (original) (raw)
Related papers
To be Together Medicine and Biostatistics in History: Review
Turkiye Klinikleri Journal of Biostatistics, 2017
Today, statistics in health sciences, especially in the medical field are known to be indispensable. However, in some periods of scientists claiming mutually justified by them, medicine and statistics are not met, they argued as well that the majority of scientists are advocating the opposite. In this study, the time and history to reach biostatistics is indispensable, were investigated. In the period preceding the date based on the Old Testament, the first clinical trial conducted by Daniel the prophet is accepted that. In the 17 th and 18 th centuries laid the foundation of modern statistics, and then began to be used, especially in the health field. The rise of biostatistics in the 19 th and 20 th century is considered one of the most important developments in terms of humanity. With Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson's studies, statistics has been removed from being a social science, and turned into an applied science and data collection how important and statistics in medicine necessarily need to be used has been proven. Later, biostatistics and consequently the establishment of associations that uses a combination of medicine and biostatistics begin publication of articles with the importance of this issue has been fully realized. Today, the introduction of statistics that has been recognized that health is the scientific study and 1950's been around for years all over the world are taught as a compulsory subject in schools of medicine biostatistics.
From Clinical Counting to Evidence-Based Medicine
Several years ago, I gave a talk in Gérard Jorland's seminar on the quantification debates that stirred the Parisian medical world during the 1830s. During question period, one of my listeners asked whether the "numerical method" advocated by P.C.A. Louis was in fact evidence-based medicine (ebm). The query struck me as historically naïve; but both advocates and opponents of ebm have since made this very same connection; the latter use it to emphasize the historical legitimacy of their enterprise, while the former argue that there is nothing particularly original about ebm -old French wine with a new Canadian label. 1 The more interesting question is whether parallels and differences between nineteenth-century debates and today's can tell us something about long-standing medical efforts to quantify.
Australian family physician, 2016
The nineteenth century saw the rise of what historians of medicine have termed the 'medical gaze'. Physicians used instrumentation and trained senses to locate the site of disease within the patient's body. This change in practice went alongside changes in the physician's power and how diseases were understood. In the twenty-first century, the rise of high-throughput biomedical experiments, especially in genomics, is leading to equally dramatic shifts in medicine. Increasingly, clinical decisions may be made on the basis of data and statistical associations rather than the particularities of the case at hand. The aim of this commentary iso re-evaluate the status of precision and evidence-based medicine in light of the social, political and economic shifts they entail. Increasingly, the statistical view of diseases and people threatens to take judgment and expertise out of medical decision making. It threatens the centrality of the physician in the relationship betwee...
Objectives: To review James Jackson's analysis of bloodletting among pneumonitis patients at the newly founded Massachusetts General Hospital, in which he implemented the numerical method advocated by Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis. Study Design and Setting: The study sample included 34 cases of clinically diagnosed pneumonitis admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital between April 19, 1825, and May 10, 1835, and discharged alive. Patient data were extracted from meticulously kept case books. Jackson calculated mean number of venesections, ounces of blood taken, and days of convalescence within groups stratified by day of the disease when first bloodletting occurred. He also calculated average convalescence within groups stratified by age, sex, prior health, ves-ication, and day of the disease when the patients were admitted to the hospital. Results: To Jackson's surprise, it ''seemed to be of less importance, whether our patients were bled or not, than whether they entered the hospital early or late'' after the onset of the pneumonitis. Bloodletting was ineffective. Our multivariate reanalysis of his data confirms his conclusion. Outstandingly for his time, Jackson ruled out unwarranted effects of covariates by tabulating their numerical relations to the duration of pneumonia. Conclusion: Using novel gathering of patient clinical data from hospital records and quantitative analytical methods, Jackson contributed results that challenged conventional wisdom and bridged French therapeutic epistemology and American medical pragma-tism.
Evolution of (bio)statistics in medical research: Fifty eight years of "Numbering Off
2013
Mathematical advances reached their zenith in the seventeenth century. Pierre-Simon Laplace and Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis, among others, advocated that probability theory and numerical procedures could be useful in all scientific disciplines, including medicine and clinical tests. However, they were opposed by most of the clinicians of the day. Prominent among the opposition was Claude Bernard, arguably the father of modern medicine, who urged doctors to reject statistics as a foundation for experimental, therapeutic and pathological science. For over a century, his disciples neglected his words almost entirely. In 1954, the British Medical Journal published "Numbering Off", the proceedings of a debate sponsored by the Royal Statistical Society on the growing application and influence of statistics in medicine. In this article, we discuss the changes in the field since the publication of the paper and the increase in mathematical sophistication and use of computers. A brief history of biostatistics is also presented. Currently, researchers depend on statistical software, which makes calculations extremely simplistic; but the increased use of computer software has resulted in the misuse of biostatistics, when data is entered into computers without understanding it and a result is generated, instead of the result. Briefly, the future is also discussed.