William Black

author

William Black

1749–1829

An Irish physician and medical writer, he helped bring numbers and careful observation into the study of disease and mortality in the late 1700s. His books range from practical medicine to broad historical surveys of the field.

1 Audiobook

A Comparative View of the Mortality of the Human Species, at All Ages And of the Diseases and Casualties by Which They Are Destroyed or Annoyed. Illustrated With Charts and Tables

A Comparative View of the Mortality of the Human Species, at All Ages And of the Diseases and Casualties by Which They Are Destroyed or Annoyed. Illustrated With Charts and Tables

by William Black

About the author

Born in Ireland in 1749, William Black studied medicine at the University of Leiden, where he earned his M.D. in 1772. He later practiced in London and was admitted as a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in 1787.

Black is remembered as an early medical statistician as well as a physician. His work Observations on the Mortality of Mankind was among the first English-language studies to use numerical data to examine patterns of disease and death, showing an unusually modern interest in public health and evidence.

He also wrote widely on medical practice and history, including An Historical Sketch of Medicine and Surgery. Black died in 1829, leaving behind a body of work that sits at the meeting point of medicine, statistics, and the history of science.