I have only just joined up the dots between:
Quetelets ‘discovery’ of the BMI
Florence Nightingale
Lies, damned lies & statistics
The Sally Clark case
In his Treatise on Man, in the introduction to Book Second: Development of Stature, Weight, Strength &c, Quetelet says:
… suppose that we want to establish the age of an individual … we shall be reduced to mere empirical conjecture. However, legal medicine presents numerous examples where such determinations become necessary … When a physician is called to examine the body of an infant found lifeless, & when, in a legal inquiry, he, from simple inspection, establishes the presumed age of this child, it is evident that he cannot but impose his judgement on those who read the inquiry, however erroneous it may otherwise be, since there are no elements existing for the verification of it. If … there were exact tables which might enable one to ascertain, at different ages, the values of these physical qualities, & the limits within which they are found in individuals … such … ought not to be neglected by legal medicine, since they tend to substitute … exact data for conjectural estimates, which are always vague & often faulty
That sounds, at the least, waspish about ‘legal medicine’. One wonders if Quetelet had any particularly controversial cases in mind
In his biography of Florence Nightingale, Sir Edward Cook seemed to imply that a well known legal aphorism about lies, damn lies & expert witnesses had been neatly turned on to statistics. There was still sniping between the two camps
And so we come to a present day instance of infants found lifeless, the intervention of the Royal Statistical Society in the case of Sally Clark & the expert statement provided for the appeal by Professor Dawid to question the use of statistics by a medical expert, a century and a half after Quetelets sniping
Links: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
The Case of Sally Clark: Some Thoughts on
Probability, Law and their Intersection
