It was, in the grand scheme of things, not long ago that medicine was a primarily narrative discipline. For some centuries, medical knowledge was spread through long, discursive descriptions of diseases and their cures; epidemiology likewise employed narrative summaries of long periods of scientific observation. It was only in the twentieth century that numbers were routinely mobilized to transmit and translate medicine across countries and between continents. This history of medical enumeration, and its internationalization in the decades following the First World War, is the focus of this ambitious and far-reaching study by Yi-Tang Lin. Moving fluidly between Asia, Europe, and North America, Lin details how statistical methods were developed for and shaped by the Chinese-speaking world. In doing so, Lin’s book offers a much-needed bridge between the history of quantification in the tradition of Theodore Porter (Citation1995) and Ian Hacking (Citation1990) and the vibrant recent anthropological scholarship on the ascendency of metrics as an essential characteristic of contemporary global health (e.g., Adams Citation2016).
This is, in some respects, a story of epistemic transfer from West to East. Each chapter begins by detailing the development of medical statistics and institution-building in the North Atlantic, before pivoting to explain how the statistical practices and infrastructures initially developed in the West came to be employed in China or Taiwan. The first two chapters detail the Rockefeller Foundation and the Millbank Memorial Fund as the principal North American actors in the development of interwar health internationalism. These organizations bankrolled the development of medical statistics in storied institutions, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in particular, and facilitated the early development of medical statistics in the Republic of China (ROC). The familiar story of Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed is first outlined and then enriched through the history of their students’ work in China, with the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) and its demonstration center, the Peking First Health Station (PFHS), both funded by the Rockefeller and staffed by Johns Hopkins graduates. The third chapter goes on to focus on the origins of international cooperation in epidemiological surveillance, detailing how the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) pushed for the regular collection of standardized disease data, as well as the diplomatic challenges that were posed by such an endeavor. In much the same vein, the fourth chapter details the Millbank Memorial Fund’s health demonstration program as an experiment in public health which was developed in the 1920s in the rural United States and later extended into China.
