Epidemiology's 350th Anniversary: 1662–2012

Abstract

Between 1600 and 1700, sudden, profound, and multifarious changes occurred in philosophy, science, medicine, politics, and society. In an extremely convulsed century, these profound and convergent upheavals produced the equivalent of a cultural big bang, which opened a new domain of knowledge acquisition based on population thinking and group comparisons. In 1662, when John Graunt applied—for the first time—the new approach to the analysis of causes of death in London, he gave epidemiology a singular date of birth. This was exactly 350 years ago.