Mathematics and medicine.

Abstract

There is nothing novel in the application of mathematics to medicine. The most obvious and most often quoted example is Medical Statistics which traces its origin to the work of Graunt on the London Bills of Mortality and Halley on the Breslau figures in the mid-17th century, the period which also saw the origin in the minds of Pascal and Fermat of the mathematical theory of probability which is the indispensable instrument of modern statistics. Statistics is concerned with populations, any kind of populations, so that its bearing upon the management of individual cases is indirect as, for example, through the findings of epidemiologists and their application to public health. The earliest and most familiar example of the application of mathematics to the management of an individual patient is furnished by ophthalmology, which depends essentially on geometrical optics for the correction of errors of refraction. The origin of spectacles, perhaps as early as the 14th century, is obscure and was certainly empirical. It seems that Kepler, of Kepler's Laws, at the beginning of the 17th century was the first to have a clear understanding of the eye as an optical instrument and to recognise that the image on the retina is inverted. A brief but clear account, probably the first in English, was given in Newton's Optics (1st edn., pp. 10–11) published in 1704, and a very detailed account, including rules for prescription of glasses, will be found in Robert Smith's Compleat System of Optics, published in 1738.