The Issue of Statistics in Medicine in the Era of the Fever Crisis: Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and the Numerical School

With the advent of artificial intelligence and its extensive use of statistics in clinical practice, ethical and epistemic challenges in applying statistical methods have become increasingly significant. Issues include preventing statistics from producing merely correlative knowledge lacking causality, ensuring meaningful patient care, preserving patient individuality, and balancing qualitative and quantitative aspects. However, these concerns are not new. This article argues that P-C-A Louis’s 19th-century systematic use of statistics produced an epistemological rupture in medicine, fundamentally transforming clinical practice. The study examines the role of hospitals in promoting statistics, presents Louis’s doctrine, and summarizes the favorable reception of his ideas, alongside contemporary debates and criticisms regarding the numerical method. I suggest that Louis’s epistemological rupture is pivotal to understanding contemporary biomedicine due to three main features of his doctrine: methodologically, as statistics became the main scientific method for medicine; therapeutically-clinically, as patient individuality was significantly diminished; and epistemically, as, for the sake of comparison, qualitative aspects were reduced to quantitative ones.

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