[Phys-L] Semmelweiss and Snow. Was: Re: Particles, Fields or ?

[Bernard Cleyet <bernardcleyet@redshift.com>]

Semmelweis predated Snow by two years.  Is he not credited,  because Austria was more hidebound than England? 

"Epidemiology is the study (or the science of the study) of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology

bc thinks the Semmelweis effect is operative.  

Note:  both predated the “germ theory" of that Frenchman.

On 2013, May 17, , at 15:32, John Denker <jsd@av8n.com> wrote:

v. much deleted.


> Humans, for various psychological reasons, always want to know
> /why/ something happened ... and they are forever cooking up
> ways of explaining why.  Most of this is baloney.  On the other
> hand, there is such a thing as cause and effect.  The guys who 
> know the most about this aren't the physicists;  they're the 
> epidemiologists.
>  http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_%28physician%29
Additional deleted.

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