Epidemiology and Social Sciences: Towards a Critical Reengagement in the 21st Century

ly, mathematicians newly plumb laws of probability, elucidating links between seemingly disparate games of chance, decisions of juries, and errors in celestial observations (9, 18-23). What Hacking has termed the era of the "avalanche of numbers," the "taming of chance," and the "erosion of determinism" is begun (21-23). New times call for new concepts, and in this context of social upheaval and redefinition of the contours of the state and society, French writers create "la science sociale" (7, 24, 25). Offering promise of systematic and increasingly quantitative knowledge of society, the term first bursts into public view in a French revolutionary pamphlet in 1789, is adopted by the influential mathematician-turned-political philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and enters British and American English through translation of texts by Condorcet and his colleagues (24, 25). Epidemiology, too, comes into its own, by name (26). The term is coined, and gains currency, in 1802, when Don Joaquin Villalba publishes Epidemiologia Espanola, a chronicle of epidemics in Spain (27). It quickly encompasses the era's new quantitative investigations of mounting outbreaks of deadly diseases, both old (e.g., typhus) and new (e.g., cholera and yellow fever). These epidemics bum through fast-growing and increasingly congested cities, home to commercial ports and to squalid neighborhoods barely housing the multitudes of laborers employed in (or unemployed by) the new factories of the Industrial Revolution (28, 29). Only, in this period, I would argue that distinctions between epidemiology and social sciences are imposed chiefly by hindsight. More germane is thennew and common cause: "the application of the numerical method to living beings in all their social relations" (30, p. 39), as defined in 1839 by one of the era's prolific investigators, William Guy (1810-1885), an early member of both the London Statistical Society (founded in 1834) and the London Epidemiological Society (founded in 1850). Employing the umbrella term "the science of statistics," Guy explains: Man (sic), considered as a social being, is its object; the mean duration of his life, and the probable period of his death; the circumstances which preserve or destroy the health of his body, or affect the culture of his mind; the wealth which he amasses, the crimes which he commits, and the punishments which he incurs—all these are weighed, compared, and calculated; and nothing which can affect the welfare of the society of which he is a member, or the glory and prosperity of the country to which he belongs, is excluded from its grand and comprehensive survey (30, p. 35). A quarter of a century later, in 1865, a similar breadth of concerns appears in the founding statement of the American Social Science Association (31). Under this umbrella, influential researchers from Louis Rene Villerme (1782-1863) in France (32) to William Farr (1807-1883) in England (33) to Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) in Germany (34) to Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), the Belgian astronomer-turnedEpidemiol Rev Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000