Epidemiology and social sciences: towards a critical reengagement in the 21st century.

Abstract

ly, mathematicians newly plumb laws of probability, elucidating links between seemingly disparate games of decisions of juries, and errors in celestial observations (9, 18-23). What Hacking has termed era of avalanche of numbers, taming of chance, and erosion of determinism is begun (21-23). New times call for new concepts, and in this context of social upheaval and redefinition of contours of state and society, French writers create la science sociale (7, 24, 25). Offering promise of systematic and increasingly quantitative knowledge of society, term first bursts into public view in a French revolutionary pamphlet in 1789, is adopted by influential mathematician-turned-political philosopher, 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 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 multitudes of laborers employed in (or unemployed by) new factories of 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 numerical method to living beings in all their social relations (30, p. 39), as defined in 1839 by one of era's prolific investigators, William Guy (1810-1885), an early member of both London Statistical Society (founded in 1834) and London Epidemiological Society (founded in 1850). Employing umbrella term the science of statistics, Guy explains: Man (sic), considered as a social being, is its object; mean duration of his life, and probable period of his death; circumstances which preserve or destroy health of his body, or affect culture of his mind; wealth which he amasses, crimes which he commits, and punishments which he incurs—all these are weighed, compared, and calculated; and nothing which can affect welfare of society of which he is a member, or glory and prosperity of 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 founding statement of 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), Belgian astronomer-turnedEpidemiol Rev Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000