Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis: Similarity

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis was French physician. Explore interesting quotes on similarity.
Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis: 12   quotes 1   like

“All [knowledge] comes from experience, it is true, but experience is nothing if it does not form collections of similar facts. Now, to make collections is to count.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis

Letter to Jean Cruveilhier (1837), as quoted by William Coleman, Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (1982)

Knowledge

“The objection made to the numerical method, to wit, the difficulty or impossibility of forming classes of similar facts, is alike applicable to all the methods that might be substituted; that it is impossible to appreciate each case with mathematical exactness, and it is precisely on this account that enumeration becomes necessary; by so doing, the errors, (which are inevitable,) being the same in two groups of patients subjected to different treatment, mutually compensate each other, and they may be disregarded without sensibly affecting the exactness of the results.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis

p, 125
Researches on the effects of bloodletting... (1836)

Error , Mathematics

“In any epidemic… let us suppose five hundred of the sick, taken indiscriminately, to be subjected to one kind of treatment, and five hundred others, taken in the same manner, to be treated in a different mode; if the mortality is greater among the first, than among the second, must we not conclude that the treatment was less appropriate, or less efficacious in the first class, than in the second? It is unavoidable; for among so large a collection, similarities of condition will necessarily be met with, and all things being equal, except the treatment, the conclusion will be rigorous.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis

p, 125
Researches on the effects of bloodletting... (1836)