Epidemiological and Environmental Surveillance: Counting and Measuring Pathogenic Signs

Abstract

The medicine of the environment seemed to many eighteenth-century physicians to provide a way to anticipate epidemic disease, and thus to block or elude its effects. In surveying some leading and representative selections from environmentalist literature from Sydenham to the end of the eighteenth century, we have seen that this idea was shared across Europe and regions of the globe inhabited by Europeans. Let us now probe more deeply into the methodology of observing the environment, and read both the lines and between the lines of our sources seeking insight into the mathematics and the statistical procedures of this inquiry.

I have often thought that if such a [meteorological] Register… were kept in every County in England, and so constantly published, many things relating to the Air, Winds, Health, Fruitfulness, &c. might by a sagacious man be collected from them, and several Rules and Observations concerning the extent of Winds and Rains, &c. be in time established, to the great advantage of Mankind.¹

Locke