TY  - BOOK
AU  - Rusnock,Andrea Alice
TI  - Vital accounts: quantifying health and population in eighteenth-century England and France 
T2  - Cambridge studies in the history of medicine
SN  - 9780511550041 (ebook)
AV  - RA407.5.G7 R87 2002
U1  - 614.4/241/09033 21
PY  - 2002///
CY  - Cambridge
PB  - Cambridge University Press
KW  - Mortality
KW  - England
KW  - History
KW  - 18th century
KW  - France
KW  - Smallpox
KW  - Vaccination
KW  - Medical climatology
KW  - Public health
KW  - Statistics, Medical
N1  - Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015)
N2  - Why did Europeans begin to count births and deaths? How did they collect the numbers and what did they do with them? Through a compelling comparative analysis, Vital Accounts charts the work of the physicians, clergymen and government officials who crafted the sciences of political and medical arithmetic in England and France during the long eighteenth-century, before the emergence of statistics and regular government censuses. Andrea A. Rusnock presents a social history of quantification that highlights the development of numerical tables, influential and enduring scientific instruments designed to evaluate smallpox inoculation, to link weather and disease to compare infant and maternal mortality rates, to identify changes in disease patterns and to challenge prevailing views about the decline of European population. By focusing on the most important eighteenth century controversies over health and population, Rusnock shows how vital accounts - the numbers of births and deaths - became the measure of public health and welfare
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550041
ER  -