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Gérald Jorland, Annick Opinel, George Weisz (eds), Body counts: medical quantification in historical and sociological perspectives/ La Quantification médicale, perspectives historiques et sociologiques, Montreal and London, published for Fondation Mérieux by McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005, pp. x, 417, £64.00 (hardback 0-7735-2829-6).
The seventeen essays (plus Introduction) in this book complicate and deepen the narrative about the use of quantification in medicine over the longue durée. I say "complicate", because in their Introduction, Gérald Jorland and George Weisz make the point that there is much more to the history of medical numbering than the received wisdom of persistent rejection until the acceptance of mathematics as a research tool in medicine after the second World War. The chapters take the reader from the early eighteenth through to the early twenty-first century and cover a lot of international ground (though with recurring attention to Great Britain and France in particular). Written in either English or French (a paragraph abstract in French of the English chapters and vice versa would help non-bilingual readers), the chapters are organized into four broad themes, namely: 'Medical Arithmetic'; 'Quantification and Instrumentation'; 'Statistics and the Underdetermination of Theories'; and 'Reducing Uncertainty and the Politics of Health'.
Of course, many individual chapters overlap these categorizations...