The Source of Mori Ogai’s View of Statistics:

“Die numerische Methode” of Friedrich Martius

Abstract

This paper compares Mori Ogai’s three papers, written during a controversy about statistics and the statistical method, with Friedrich Martius’s 1881 paper, which has been neglected by the extant scholarship on this topic. The European medical community at the time was divided between the protagonists of experimental methods based on medical determinism and those of numerical methods focussing on statistical data. Martius’s paper was written from the standpoint of the experimentalists, seeking to demarcate the limits of the epistemic claims of statistical approaches in medicine. Mori’s view of statistics, owing much to Martius’s paper, can be characterised as a conditional approval à la Bernard that recognises the auxiliary significance of statistics only when the cause cannot be identified using experimental methods.