In an invigorating comparative and interdisciplinary reconsideration of the role of different types of medical "counting," this wide-ranging bilingual volume takes us from the mortality tables of the eighteenth century to the movement for "evidence-based medicine" in our own day. Culled from the proceedings of "La quantification dans les sciences medicales et de la sante: perspective historique" held at the Musee Claude-Bernard in France in 2002, Body Counts moves beyond the usual emphasis on public health and clinical medicine to include the central role of numbers in laboratory work and...