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Social Thought and Social Statatics in the Early Nineteenth Century

The Case of Sanitary Statistics in England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Karl H. Metz
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The numerical determination of the relationship between the sanitary conditions in which people live, and the risks to health and life this may involve is a relatively new method of understanding infectious disease. It came to be known as “sanitary statistics” in the early nineteenth century, when this kind of investigation reached the climax of its social importance. But its roots go back to the late seventeenth century, when England was again visited by the plague, shattering a country that had hardly recovered from two decades of civil unrest. The two basic motives of sanitary statistics, which later made it so potent a reformist tool, were already present then in a first outline, namely the attempt to rationalize the frightful phenomenon of the epidemic and the conviction that its causes were somehow bound up with the social organization of urban life. As long as people had seen in the great epidemics God's punishing hand, the flagellants' reaction made sense. Man could only bow to Him; the arm of flesh might at most seek to avoid His punishment by punishing itself in advance. But when in 1854 the Presbytery of Edinburgh suggested to the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to call for a national fast against cholera, they received the cold reply that “the weal or woe of mankind depends on the observance or neglect of those laws” which sanitary statistics had recently discovered. Divine reference was replaced by statistical reference, and the correlations thus revealed pointed to action by the “arm of flesh”.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , August 1984 , pp. 254 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1984

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper has been presented to the research group on “The Probabilistic Revolution: Dynamics of Scientific Development, 1800–1930”, at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld in March 1983. I should like to express my thanks to Professors William Coleman (Madison, Wisconsin), Ian Hacking (Toronto) and Lorenz Krüger (Berlin).

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8 The term “social statistics”, as understood in the nineteenth century, covered both moral and vital statistics. Moral statistics were concerned mainly with matters of education, crime and intemperance. Vital statistics were the collection of data on births and mortality and their causes. “Sanitary Statistics” is a term much used in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, denoting the correlation of death rates with the hygienic conditions in which people lived. It is synonymous with vital statistics as far as the material employed is concerned, although its very name stresses the practical application of its findings.

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