An example of political arithmetic: The evaluation of spa therapy at the Georgian Bath Infirmary, 1742–1830

Abstract

IBetween the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714, England experienced a "golden age of political arithmetic" in which the work of William Petty and John Graunt, Gregory King and Charles Davenant was greatly admired.The traditional chronology of modern statistics has either ignored this period altogether or dismissed it as a false start and emphasized the significance of developments during the 1820s and 1830s.Historians have increasingly contested this orthodox position.Writing in 1989, John Brewer argued that the fiscal-military state, expanding within the cultural context created by the Scientific Revolution, gave rise to a demand for quantitative data to understand and control contemporary problems.'More recently, Julian Hoppit has reasserted the revisionist case, insisting that the Georgians were no less statistically inclined than their later Stuart forefathers.2Hoppit's argument followed Davenant in defining political arithmetic as "the art of reasoning by figures, upon things relating to government".3None the less, he also recognized that not all this information was "officially inspired" because "[m]any outside the corridors of power saw counting as an important way of thinking about their world and the possibilities for policy making".4Medical practitioners were one such group.Political arithmetic acknowledged the relevance of their skills to the large and healthy population that was part of its social mercantilist brief.'Therefore, as early as 1676, William Petty was calculating the economic drain of premature

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