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\noindent{\bf William FARR}\\
b. 30 November 1807 - d. 14 April 1883
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\noindent{\bf Summary} Farr is internationally renowned as developer of 
vital statistics and
epidemiology.
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William Farr was born at Kenley, in Shropshire, England, the oldest son in a
family of agricultural labourers.  His education was fortunately
entrusted to Joseph Pryce, a tutor who enrolled him in the local
school.  There he was taught by a dissident Anglican minister who
was a member of the medical, surgical and pharmaceutical
guilds.  Farr pursued his training in Paris, and later
at University College London.  In 1832, aged 25, he began to practise
as a pharmacist, and published some articles in medical periodicals
such as {\it The Lancet,} and {\it The British Medical Almanack} (which he
edited for several years).  He also
became editor of his own journal, {\it The British Annals of Medicine,
Pharmacy, Vital Statistics and General Science} with the same publishers as the
{\it Almanack}, but this journal lasted
only for 8 months.  It should be noted that in the same year
(1837) he contributed to McCulloch's famous book {\it A Statistical
Account of the British Empire}.  Two years later, with Edwin Chadwick's
support, he was appointed to the General Register Office (GRO), the
new British statistical services unit. The treatment of ``vital statistics" 
in the GRO between 1840 and
1880 may be attributed mainly to him, though he never achieved the
enviable position of Registrar General.  Despite his position as an
essentially anonymous civil servant, Farr was fully familiar with
the latest demographic developments of the times, and was able to
share his understanding with members of Parliament, and 
of the Whig Party with
which he was connected through Chadwick and Florence Nightingale (q.v.).
His statistical expertise enabled him to verify Dr. John Snow's
theory on the propagation of cholera through the London water
supply, thus allowing Britain to reduce the effects of this type of
epidemic after 1860, when other European countries appeared
helpless againt it.  

Demography was based on the study of mortality
and Farr devoted a large
proportion of his works to it (J. and M. Dupaquier, 1985).  He saw the 
dangers of comparisons
based simply on the crude mortality rate, because of variations due
to age structure and sex differences.  He appears to have followed
up on the work of the actuary G.P. Neison in the {\it Journal of the
Statistical Society of London}, 1844 on the methods of
``population standard" and ``mortality standard".  Few improvements remained 
possible in mortality tables after the writings of the Swede, Pehr Wilhelm
Wargentin (1717-1783), who had successfully related the number of deaths by age
groups to the corresponding surviving population, and the
calculations of life expectancy by the Huygens (q.v.) brothers and A.
Deparcieux.  Wargentin's method had been extended by the actuaries
J. Milne for the city of Carlisle, and T. R. Edmonds for the whole
of England.  Farr followed up on their studies,  successively constructing 
three mortality tables: the first using the 1841 census and deaths
during that year, the second using the same census and deaths in
the period 1838-1844, and the third broadening his sources to the 2
censuses of 1841 and 1851, and deaths for the period 1838-1854.

He was thus able to launch a life insurance scheme for all
employees of the Post Office, at a time when private
companies were using only data based on their customer records. His
most original scientific contribution, wrongly attributed to Reed
and Merrell, was to give the probability  $(p)$  on the basis of
the mortality rate  $m$  according to the equation:
$$p = (1-{\frac{1}{2}}m)/(1+{\frac{1}{2}}m)$$
This result may be found in the fifth {\it Annual Report to Parliament}
of 1843.  Another original contribution, which remained unnoticed by both
his contemporaries and students was the combination of
a fecundity with a mortality table, together with all the necessary
calculations for a net reproduction rate ({\it Philosophical
Transactions}, 1880; see Dupaquier, 1984).  However,
his objective was limited to finding the total number of children, and
he never defined the concept of net reproduction rate.  We must
therefore continue to acknowledge the Scottish doctor, R.L. Tait and the
German statistician, G.F.R. Boeckh, as the true pioneers in this field.

Although he was a doctor trained to respect the ideas of
Hippocrates, he nevertheless absorbed the teachings of the French
school of clinical anatomy (Broussais, Laennec, Dupuytren,
Magendie) and the works of the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873).
Valuing the latter's works too highly, he conceived a
``zymotic" theory, in which blood was the carrier of poisons known
as zymimes, having an effect similar to fermentation.  This led him
to believe at first that cholera resulted from a change in the
chemical reaction of organic matter, which was transmitted through
the air.  He was thus led to a law relating the spread of cholera to
the elevation of homes above the Thames, a striking example of an error in
causal logic ({\it Cholera Report} of 1852;  see Dupaquier and
Lewes, 1989).  But the report on cholera in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne given by the local Registrar in 1853 showed
very clearly the relation between the use of water pumped from the
river downstream (after it had passed through the city) and the recurrence of
the epidemic.  Farr had the courage to admit his own error  and 
the validity of J. Snow's and W. Budd's
reasoning, which attributed the spread of cholera to the water
supply.  He supported the Metropolis Water Act of 1852, which
recommended that, within three years,
water companies should stop pumping water from the tidal part
of the Thames, and he collaborated
with Snow to control the spread of cholera in 1854. 
Through his organisation Farr could provide Snow
with the information he required to quickly and unequivocally prove
that cholera was spread through water, hence allowing
the necessary sanitary measures to be taken.

Soon after Florence Nightingale's return from the Crimea in 1856, she
succeeded in having a Royal Commission on the Health of the Army created,
with her friend and statistical mentor, Farr, as one of the Royal
Commissioners. She intended with his help to make a comparison of the rates
of sickness and death in army barracks with rates in civilian life.


After cholera reappeared in 1866, all water was pumped from
healthy sources, and Farr gave  the
English political establishment very convincing arguments
for this practice.  As an official delegate to the
International Statistical Congresses, he proposed a nomenclature
for the official cause of death in 1855 but this did not achieve the
success he had hoped for.  On the other hand, he was heard with
great respect when he described the fight against cholera in
England at the 1867 Congress.  Disappointed by his failure to
obtain the job of Registrar General in 1879, his health declined
and he died a few year later.
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\begin{thebibliography}{3}
\bibitem{1}  Dupaquier, M. (1984). William Farr, d\'emographe.
{\it Population}, {\bf 39}, 339-356.

\bibitem{2}  Dupaquier, J. and Dupaquier, M. (1985). {\it Histoire de la
d\'emographie.} Perrin, Paris.

\bibitem{3}  Dupaquier, M., and Lewes, F. (1989). Le chol\'era en
Angleterre au XIXe si\`ecle.  La m\'edecine \`a l'\'epreuve de la
statistique. {\it Annales de D\'emographie Historique}, 215-221.

\bibitem{4}  Eyler, M. (1979). {\it Victorian Social Medicine: the Ideas and
Methods of William Farr},  Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore.

\bibitem{5}  Farr, W. (1885). {\it Vital Statistics: A Memorial Volume of
selections from the reports and writings of William Farr.}, GRO,
London. [Reissued by The Scarecrow Press, Metuchen N.J. 1975.]

\bibitem{6}  Lancaster, H.O. (1994). {\it Quantitative Methods in Biological and Medical
Sciences.} Springer, New York. [Section 12.1].

\bibitem{7}  Lewes, F. (1983). William Farr and cholera. {\it Population Trends},
{\bf 31}, 8-12.

\bibitem{8}  Pelling, M. (1978). {\it Cholera, Fever and English Medicine}.
1825-1865. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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\hfill{Michel Dupaquier}


\end{thebibliography}

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