Tabulating Epidemics
Introduction
Tables as Tools of Reasoning in the History of Epidemiology 1896-1940
The hypothesis of the project is that tabulation practices, including ways of visualising data through different table forms, have specifically shaped the research, communication, and epistemology of modern epidemiological reasoning. As a form of collecting, organising and presenting epidemiological data, tabulation has enforced processes of standardisation and classification. As visual devices, tables have enabled epidemiologists to communicate the comparison of populations and tables established multi-factorial association as a hallmark of modern epidemiology. Tables and their associated practices were thus a pivotal ingredient in the epoch-defining transformation of epidemiology from a narrative and historical practice into a field based on formal mathematics, models, data, and quantification.
Content
This project advances the potential of recent scholarship in the medical humanities on the material conditions of medical knowledge, including the research team’s developing work on formal practices in epidemiology. The planned work will incorporate and extend crucial insights into the practice and epistemology of tabulation from the history of statistics, astronomy, demography, and actuarial science. This approach significantly revises historical understandings of epidemiology’s modern transformation in a way that informs contemporary questions about authority and tabular reasoning in epidemiology, exemplified by the ubiquitous dashboards of the Covid-19 pandemic.