Christopher Phillips

This article describes a study of thirteen women who had lived with companion animals during a domestic violence relationship. The women were interviewed in order to investigate how animals were affected by the violence, as well as how veterinarians were involved. Most women reported that companion animals had been abused or neglected by their partners, and they had delayed leaving due to concerns for animals left in the home. Affected animals most commonly demonstrated protection of the woman, and avoidance or aggression towards the partner. Only one woman confided to a veterinarian that she and her animals were living with domestic violence, and in four cases women’s partners had prevented them from accessing veterinary care. It is recommended that veterinarians are educated on issues regarding animal guardianship during domestic violence to enhance their ability to provide knowledgeable and compassionate support when confronted with these cases in practice.

Modern epidemiological methods often elide the distinction between individuals and populations in practice. Health data and outcomes gathered from a population can be, and often are, applied to a specific person, guiding preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions. This article looks at a key site for the origin of this elision, the Framingham Heart Study, and shows how a novel methodological ‘calculator’ for individual risk of future disease emerged from what was originally designed as a community-based epidemiological study. The article explains how the methodological transformation of epidemiology and biostatistics was surprisingly driven by methods emerging from outside of traditionally trained epidemiologists, particularly through statisticians trained in non-medical areas of the human sciences, including economics, sociology, and demography. It therefore also explains how and why epidemiologists became far more statistically sophisticated and the field more dependent on statistical methods by the 1970s than they had been in the 1940s.

David Lindsay Roberts. Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History. ix + 244 pp., bibl., index. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. $29.95 (cloth); ISBN 9781421433080. E-book available. Julian Havil. Curves for the Mathematically Curious: An Anthology of the Unpredictable, Historical, Beautiful, and Romantic. xx + 259 pp., apps., refs., index. Princeton, N.J./Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. $29.95 (cloth); ISBN 9780691180052. E-book available. David S. Richeson. Tales of Impossibility: The Two-Thousand-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity. xii + 436 pp., notes, refs., index. Princeton, N.J./Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. $29.95 (cloth); ISBN 9780691192963. E-book availabl