Reply to Farr and Jarvis

William Farr, The Lancet, and epidemic cholera.

In 1867 William Farr published his report into the cholera epidemic which, in 1866, had killed over five thousand people living in the Whitechapel area of East London. It was the last of the four epidemics which ravaged the capital in the mid-nineteenth century [1]. Farr, after an early career writing for The Lancet under its founding editor Thomas Wakley, had been appointed ‘compiler of abstra...

Medical Statistics from Graunt to Farr

The four Fitzpatrick Lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1943 by Major Greenwood, have been reprinted as a stimulating monograph on medical statistics. The particular epoch examined (circa 16301840) begins with the publications of John Graunt, whose contributions to the subject of medical and vital statistics have always been regarded as great classics of science...

Jarvis Voice Controlled Devices

Jarvis is a system designed to respond to user issued commands to provide convenient control over a number of electronic devices. These devices can be lights, TV's, radios, stereos, etc. The system will be designed to work best within a moderate home with the convenience of a wireless router. Fig. 1.1 shows how each stage of the system will interact with each other. More details on this are pro...

In defense of Farr and Nightingale.

Commentary AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF WILLIAM FARR 1

William Farr must be counted a founder, even the founder, of epidemiology in its modern form. Among the special contributions of men like Quetelet and Galton to biostatistics, of John Snow to the survey as an explanatory instrument, and of Pasteur and Koch to specifications of environmental agents and host immunity, Farr's contributions surely cover the broadest range of the activities of conte...