Louis-Adolphe Bertillon

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Louis-Adolphe Bertillon

Louis-Adolphe Bertillon (born  April 1, 1821 in Paris , †  February 28, 1883 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a French physician , anthropologist , statistician , demographer and mycologist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Bertill. ".

Live and act

Louis-Adolphe Bertillon received his doctorate in medicine in 1852. Even in his dissertation he dealt with statistical questions (in the context of health policy). In it he criticized the average values, artificial from his medical point of view, which were obtained from the totality of the data collected. Instead he advocated the formation of “natural” mean values ​​from socially homogeneous parts of the population in order to be able to derive a more realistic picture of the situation from the statistics instead of just abstract laws.

From 1854 to 1860 Bertillon worked as a doctor at the Montmorency Hospital . During this time he wrote several articles in which he advocated vaccinations and contradicted vaccination opponents .

In 1859 he was a co-founder of the Paris Society for Anthropology . In his writings he adopted the term “demography” introduced by his father-in-law Achille Guillard - but with a new meaning from 1865: While Guillard saw primarily the economic benefits of collected population data, Bertillon described “demography” as the research into the causes of certain population developments and their effects on public health. In 1874 his comprehensive study of the population structure of France at that time, Démographie figurée de la France, appeared .

Bertillon gave the first lecture in demography in 1875 and was a co-founder of the College of Anthropology , where he held the first chair in demography and medical geography from 1876. In 1878 he presided over the International Congress on Demography. At the time of his death in 1883 he was also director of the statistical office of the city of Paris.

Bertillon also worked as a mushroom expert . He was the first to describe some mushrooms; the Scharfe Woll-Milchling bears its scientific name Lactarius bertillonii in his honor.

family

Louis-Adolphe Bertillon was the father of Jacques and Alphonse Bertillon.

Jacques Bertillon , born in 1851, was also a well-known statistician and demographer. After his father's death, he took over the management of the statistical office in Paris, which he held for the next 30 years until 1913. He designed the International Nomenclature of Causes of Death ( Bertillon Classification ), one of the first systematic registers of causes of death and the basis for today's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems of the World Health Organization .

The younger son Alphonse Bertillon , born in 1853, became known for the anthropometric system for personal identification ( Bertillonage ) he had developed and was head of the French police identification service for many years. Louis-Adolphe Bertillon played a decisive role in this career: after the son had to drop out of school due to poor performance and behavioral problems, it was thanks to the advocacy and reputation of his father that he got a job as an assistant clerk at the Paris police headquarters in 1879 came up with the idea for his system and was able to prevail. Alphonse Bertillon gained additional notoriety through his inglorious role in the Dreyfus affair .

Fonts (selection)

  • Conclusions statistiques contre les détracteurs de la vaccine précédées d un essai sur la méthode statistique appliquée à l'étude de l'homme . 1857.
  • Philosophy médicale à propos des idéalités de M. le Dr Pidoux ou Recherche des méthodes employées en médecine . 1857.
  • Valeur philosophique de l'hypothèse du transformisme, Masson et fils . 1871.
  • Demographie figurée de la France . 1874.
  • Mouvements de la population dans les divers états de l'Europe et notamment en France . 1877.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Rainer Mackensen: Population research and politics in Germany in the 20th century. Springer, 2006, p. 186 ff.
  2. a b Julius Pagel : Bertillon, Louis-Adolphe . In: Biographical lexicon of outstanding doctors of the nineteenth century. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1901, Sp.  157–158 .
  3. ^ A b John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. RobertsonAdolphe-Louis Jacques Bertillon. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
  4. Bertillon, Louis Adolphe . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 3 : Austria - Bisectrix . London 1910, p. 812–813 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
  5. So z. B. the cone cap mushroom or the woolly milkling : Amanita virosa / Lactarius velutinus on MycoBank.org
  6. ↑ Reference date: February 13, 1914 - anniversary of the death of the criminalist Alphonse Bertillon on wdr.de (February 13, 2014).