Introduction to medical biometry and statistics / by Raymond Pearl.

  • Pearl, Raymond, 1879-1940.
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Introduction to medical biometry and statistics / by Raymond Pearl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Their use is developing in the medical field with extraordinary rapidity just now. It has seemed to me on this account that an elementary introduction to the subject designed primarily and directly for medical readers might be found particularly useful at this time. I am indebted to various persons in many ways for help in the making of this book, though for its defects I am alone responsible. First of all, to my colleagues in this laboratory, who have loyally helped in the organization and development of our teaching work to its present stage, I owe a debt which I cannot adequately de- scribe. We have worked out together our present method of teaching the subject. More specifically, I am deeply grateful to Professor Lowell J. Reed for reading critically the manuscript and catching up a number of errors which otherwise might have slipped by, and for discussing with me the most appropriate methods of presentation of many points, both in this book and in our courses of instruction. To Dr. John Rice Miner, Miss Agnes Latimer Bacon, and Dr. Flora D. Sutton I am indebted for the arithmetic work on many of the numerical illustrations of method. The wisdom and sagacity of Dr. William Travis Howard, Jr. in the broad fields of pathology, public health administration, and vital statistics have been freely at my disposal, and of inestimable aid in the whole development of the Department of Biometry and Vital Statistics of the School of Hygiene and Public Health, of which development this book is an integral part. Finally, I wish most sincerely and gratefully to acknowledge something of what I owe to the great master and creator of biom- etry, Professor Karl Pearson. When, nearly twenty years ago now, I spent a winter in his Biometric Laboratory at University College, London, I got a fund of inspiration from first-hand contact with the working of his mind, which the passing years have never lessened or dimmed, and which I have tried to pass on to my students. If we have sometimes differed on biologic matters in these years, it has meant no slightest diminution of my deep and sincere admiration for one whose sheer intellectual power has rarely been equaled in the whole history of science. Feeling this way it is a great gratification and pleasure to me that Professor