Excerpt:
Increasingly, over the past three centuries, we have come to rely upon statistical reasoning as a powerful, impartial and accurate means of understanding the social world.
However, while statistics have been used to identify and formulate effective means of addressing a range of social problems, we have used statistics in very human ways.
In this module, you will encounter a range of materials and associated learning tasks illustrating how statistical reasoning came to be applied to human affairs by six prominent European social scientists between, roughly, 1860 and 1914.
Annotation:
Now archived by the National Library of Australia and Partners, this site was created to support a class in the history of health. The five chapters here include "Health of the Body Politic," "Fever," "War's Cruel Scythe," "Quacks and Quackery," and "Populate or Perish." Each chapter includes a reading room with essays. Technical words are linked to a glossary (which is still under construction). The site also provides a chronology and a workshop with class exercises. Each chapter also includes biographies of key figures like Cesare Lombroso and synopses of important events. A few of the chapters include links to primary documents including Lambert A.J. Quetelet's "A Treatise on Man, and the Development of His Faculties," and Frances Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development." The site favors Australian medical history but should prove to be useable by scholars anywhere.