Louis Denis Jules Gavarret, sometimes referred to as Louis Dominique Jules Gavarret (28 January 1809 – 30 August 1890) was a French physician who advocated the use of statistics in medicine.

Life

Gavarret was born in

Astaffort Astaffort (; ) is a commune in the Lot-et-Garonne department in southwestern France. ...

, Lot-et-Garonne. He studied at the ''Ecole Polytechnique'' in Paris, followed by military service as an artillery officer. In 1833 he resigned his commission and began his studies with

Gabriel Andral Gabriel Andral (6 November 1797 – 13 February 1876) was a French pathologist and a professor at the University of Paris. Early life Born in Paris in 1797 to a family, originally from Espédaillac, deeply rooted in the medical profession. His ...

(1797–1876). Gavarret is remembered for the systemization and expansion of

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (14 April 178722 August 1872) was a French physician, clinician and pathologist known for his studies on tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and pneumonia, but Louis's greatest contribution to medicine was the development ...

' (1787-1872) statistical methodology in regards to medicine. Pierre Louis' contention was to make medicine an exact science in diagnosis of a medical condition, and also to refute the "inductive approach" that was prevalent at the time. Gavarret was a major proponent of the

statistical method Statistics (from German: ', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social ...

. He emphasized that the process would only work under certain conditions, such as the medical cases must be comparable, and there has to exist enough examples to reach an exact conclusion. Gavarett's precision or "confidence rate" was calculated to be 99.5% or a ratio of 212:1. In essence, the two doctors believed that through knowledge of the aggregate patient data, the disease and treatment would be understood. In 1840, Gavarret and Gabriel Andral were the first to show that

blood composition Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood is compos ...

varied depending on the pathological condition of the subject. Their research demonstrated the value of blood chemistry as a means of confirming diagnoses. His later work largely dealt with topics in the fields of

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...

and

physiology Physiology (; ) is the science, scientific study of function (biology), functions and mechanism (biology), mechanisms in a life, living system. As a branches of science, subdiscipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ syst ...

, that included research of acoustic and

phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defi ...

phenomena.

Writings

* ''Sur les modifications de properties de quelques principes du sang (fibrine, globules, materiaux solides du sérum, et eau) dans les maladies''. Ann Chim 1840 (with G. Andral). * ''Recherches sur la quantité d’acide carbonique exhalé par le poumon dans l’espèce humaine''. written with G. Andral 30 pages, 1 pl. Paris, Masson & cie., 1843. Ext.

Annales de chimie et de physique __NOTOC__ ''Annales de chimie et de physique'' (, ) is a scientific journal founded in Paris, France, in 1789 under the title ''Annales de chimie''. One of the early editors was the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. Lavoisier, an aristocrat, was ...

. * ''Principes généraux de statistique médicale, Béchet Jne et Labé'', L. Gavarret, Paris, 1840. * ''Lois générales de l'électricité dynamique'' (1843) * ''Physique médicale. De la chaleur produite par les êtres vivants'', (1855) * ''Les phénomènes physiques de la vie'', (1869).
Yale Libraries

References

History of Statistical Thinking in Medicine
19th-century French physicians 1809 births 1890 deaths People from Lot-et-Garonne {{France-med-bio-stub