| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Andrea A. Rusnock. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France. (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 249. $70.00.

Who, in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England and France, used quantification to promote innovation in the field of population and health? Which methods and arguments did they use? How legitimate was the use of numbers as instruments of proof, and to what extent did they alter the content of debates? These are the questions raised, in a comparative spirit, by Andrea A. Rusnock's book, through a series of chapters that study the creation of new fields (political arithmetic, medical arithmetic, medical meteorology) and some major controversies, such as the pros and cons of inoculation against smallpox, or the political meaning of depopulation, which became a strong (and wrong) belief in the second half of the eighteenth century. Such issues involve a wide range of interests: medicine, health, population, statistics, environment, administration, natural philosophy, among others.

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