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Title(s): Medicine by the numbers: revisiting James Cassedy's America
History by the numbers (Jim Cassedy)
James Cassedy memorial lecture
Author(s): Martensen, Robert L. (Robert Lawrence)
National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
Publication
Date: 		2008
Publication
Information: 		[Bethesda, Md.] : National Library of Medicine, 2008
Language(s): English
Format: Moving image; 060 min.; Sound; Color
Subject(s): Demography
History of Medicine
History, 19th Century
Topography, Medical
Geographic
Subject: 		United States
Rights: The National Library of Medicine believes this item to be in the public domain.
Identifier(s): See catalog record: 101479536
http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101479536
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Description: To honor the distinguished historian of medicine and long-time National Library of Medicine staffer James Cassedy, the History of Medicine Division at NLM sponsored the first annual James Cassedy memorial lecture. Speaker Robert Martensen, MD, PhD, presented this lecture titled "Medicine by the numbers: revisiting James Cassedy's America." During his long career, Cassedy explored the rich history of counting and calculating that preoccupied many 19th-century American physicians. While numerical inquiries had long interested social historians and demographers, Cassedy's "American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800-1860" (1984) and "Medicine and American Growth, 1800-1860" (1986) stimulated intellectual historians to analyze how and why our medical forebears embraced statistics. In this talk, Martensen revisits Cassedy's mid-century accounts and explores how physicians re-defined medical arithmetic as medicine turned increasingly to laboratory science in the century's closing decades.
Cast: Introduction, Donald A.B. Lindberg ; presenter, Robert Martensen.
Received: July 21, 2008; transfer; from Stephen Greenberg, public services librarian, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.

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