| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Public Health and the Risk Factor: A History of an Uneven Medical Revolution. By William G. Rothstein. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003. xiv, 466 pp. $95.00, ISBN 1-58046-127-1.)

This book starts with the history of ideas about probability, statistics, and vital statistics and then moves to consider patterns of disease and death in early twentieth-century urban settings, mostly in New York City, making particularly good use of life insurance studies. The author sees four historical changes as necessary for creating current ideas about risk factors and disease: the invention of probabilistic thinking and the gathering of statistical data, the idea that healthy life-styles will improve population health, the use of educational initiatives to encourage those life-styles, and the acceptance of multifactorial, probabilistic models for disease. I would add to his list the development of computer technology that has made possible the manipulation of large quantities of data and easy (perhaps too easy) access to quite powerful statistical tools.

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