In 1863, Florence Nightingale argued that London hospitals were dangerous, especially compared with provincial facilities. She bolstered this contention with statistics published in William Farr's Registrar-General report which claimed that 24 London hospitals had mortality rates exceeding 90%, whereas rural hospitals had an average mortality rate of 13%. Farr had calculated mortality rates by ...

OBJECTIVES This paper examines why Snow's contention that cholera was principally spread by water was not accepted in the 1850s by the medical elite. The consequence of rejection was that hundreds in the UK continued to die. METHODS Logistic regression was used to re-analyse data, first published in 1852 by William Farr, consisting of the 1849 mortality rate from cholera and eight potential e...

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) have been set up for determination of plasma IgG and IgM antibodies to native (n) and denatured (d) DNA. Normal male and female donors generally gave low values in the assays for IgG; IgM control values were higher, particularly in females. Mean values for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) were greatly raised in all four categories of as...

ID: I101 Robert Prins, John Farr, Kenneth McDonald, Shawn Fitzgerald, and Derek Sanchez Nuclear Science and Engineering Research Center and the Center for Nation Reconstruction and Capacity Development United States Military Academy West Point, New York 10996

The four Fitzpatrick Lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1943 by Major Greenwood, have been reprinted as a stimulating monograph on medical statistics. The particular epoch examined (circa 16301840) begins with the publications of John Graunt, whose contributions to the subject of medical and vital statistics have always been regarded as great classics of science...

Recent research has shown that religious individuals are much more resistant to utilitarian modes of thinking than their less religious counterparts, but the reason for this is not clear. We propose that a meta-ethical belief that morality is rooted in inviolable divine commands (i.e., endorsement of Divine Command Theory) may help explain this finding. We present a novel 20-item scale measurin...

What role does the notion of the divine play in Aristotle’s account of a good life? This is not an obvious question; god appears relatively infrequently, for example, in the Nicomachean Ethics. But it might interest us, if only because of the perplexing appearance of the divine in Book 10 of that treatise, as that which appears to underwrite the choice of a contemplative life. The cognate quest...