In an invigorating comparative and interdisciplinary reconsideration of the role of different types of medical counting, this wide-ranging bilingual volume takes us from the mortality tables of the eighteenth century to the movement for evidence-based medicine in our own day. Culled from the proceedings of La quantification dans les sciences médicales et de la santé: perspective historique held at the Musée Claude-Bernard in France in 2002, Body Counts moves beyond the usual emphasis on public health and clinical medicine to include the central role of numbers in laboratory work and medical instrumentation. Body Counts provides an innovative, historical, and sociological account of the functions of quantification.

Contributors include Luc Berlivet (INSERM, CNRS, EHESS, Paris), Alberto Cambrosio (McGill University), Sir Iain Chalmers (James Lind Library, Oxford), Nicholas Dodier (INSERM, CNRS, EHESS, Paris), Michael Donnelly (Bard College), Volker Hess (Humboldt-University), Peter Keating (University of Quebec at Montreal), Ann La Berge (Virginia Tech University), Ilana Löwy (INSERM, CNRS, EHESS, Paris), Harry M. Marks (Johns Hopkins University), Lion Murard (INSERM, CNRS, Paris), Mark Parascandola (National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland), Theodore M. Porter (University of California at Los Angeles), Andrea Rusnock (University of Rhode Island), Christiane Sinding (INSERM, CNRS, EHESS, Paris), and Ulrich Tröhler (Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität).