William Farr was an English statistician and epidemiologist.
Background
He was born at Kenley, in Shropshire, on the 30th of November 1807. Farr was born into an impoverished family, the first of five children. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Dorrington, a small village in Shropshire county, where at age seven he was apprenticed to an elderly squire and family patron.
Education
When nineteen he became the pupil of a doctor in Shrewsbury, also acting as dresser in the infirmary there. He then went to Paris to study medicine, but after two years returned to London, in 1832.
Career
In the 1830s in London, Farr wrote articles on medical topics related to public health and statistics, including several pieces that were published in the journal The Lancet. In 1837, with an extensive knowledge of statistics, he was recommended for the post of compiler of abstracts at the General Register Office of England and Wales, which registered births, marriages, and deaths. The commissioners for the 1841 census consulted him on several points, but did not in every case follow his advice. For the next two decennial censuses he acted as assistant-commissioner; for that of 1871 he was a commissioner, and he wrote the greater part of the reports of all. He had an ambition to become registrar-general; and when that post became vacant in 1879, he was so disappointed at the selection of Sir Brydges Henniker instead of himself, that he refused to stay any longer in the registrar's office. He died of paralysis of the brain a year or two later, on the 14th of April 1883.
Achievements
Views
In 1864 Farr published a report showing a disproportionately high number of deaths among miners in Cornwall. The statistics presented in the report showed that after age 35 mortality among miners was much higher than among males exclusive of miners. After comparing the average annual numbers of deaths among miners in Cornwall with those among miners in select districts of Durham and Northumberland, Farr concluded that pulmonary diseases were the chief cause of the high mortality rate among Cornish miners. He further suggested that excess mortality from pulmonary diseases reached its maximum after middle age because by then mine conditions had sufficient time to produce their effect on miners’ health. Farr inferred that the diseases were due to labour conditions inside the mines. Being a conscious reformer, Farr opposed the Malthusian views in fashion in his lifetime. Against the idea that population grows geometrically while food supply can grow only arithmetically, he argued that human inventiveness could increase food productivity and, moreover, that plants and animals serving as sources of food also grow geometrically. Against English economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus’s idea that men reproduce akin to rabbits—without concern for the consequences of rapid population growth—Farr showed with statistics that in England the average age at marriage was 24–25 years old, about eight years after women reached reproductive maturity. He also showed that more than 20 percent of men and women who reached reproductive age never married. As the statistician in charge of analyzing mortality data, Farr argued in an official report that hunger was responsible for many more deaths than shown in the statistics, since its effects were generally manifested indirectly in the production of diseases of various kinds. Although he was a supporter of the miasmatic theory of disease and had initially claimed that cholera was transmitted by polluted air, Farr was finally persuaded otherwise by English physician John Snow. In 1866 Farr produced a monograph showing that in London cholera cases were higher among people who received water from relatively low-elevation sources served by the Southwark and Lambeth water companies.
Quotations:
"The advantages of a uniform statistical nomenclature, however im- perfect, are so obvious, that it is surprising no attention has been paid to its enforcement in bills of mortality. Each disease has in many instances been denoted by three or four terms, and each term has been applied to as many different diseases ; vague, inconvenient names have been employed, or complications have been registered, instead of primary diseases. The nomenclature is of as much importance in this depart- ment of inquiry as weights and measures in the physical sciences, and should be settled without delay. "
Connections
Farr's first wife, whom he married in 1833, had the surname Langford; she died of tuberculosis in 1837. He married Mary Elizabeth Whittal in 1842, and They had eight children of whom five survived.