Technical Knowledge in American Culture: Science, Technology and Medicine since the Early 1800s (original) (raw)

The clinical trial is one of the pinnacles of modern scientific medicine, but, as J. Rosser Matthews persuasively shows in his Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty, the union of statistics and medicine followed an extended, often stormy, courtship that lasted well over a century and in many ways was a shotgun wedding. Matthews' tale begins with Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (1787-1872), who pioneered a numerical method to evaluate Reviewed by M MARK D. SULLIVAN, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science,