Victorian vital and mathematical statistics

Medical practitioners were largely responsible for the development and application of vital statistics in the mid-nineteenth century, whilst mathematicians established the discipline of mathematical statistics at the end of the nineteenth century in Victorian Britain. The ground-breaking work of such vital statisticians as T R Malthus, William Farr, Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale are examined. Charles Darwin's emphasis of individual biological continuous variation, which played a pivotal role in the epistemic transition from vital to mathematical is assessed in the context of the innovative work of these mathematical statisticians: Francis Galton, W F R Weldon, and primarily Karl Pearson with contributions from Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, George Udny Yule and William Sealy Gosset.