[Note from the twilight zone of medical history]

In the reorganization of The Royal Medical Society in Copenhagen in 1845, statistics gained a vital role in the activities of the society. Although physicians followed the ill-defined approach to statistics that was popular at the time, they also contributed to the development and refinement of the modern science of statistics. Contrary to the concept of statistics in use at the beginning of the 1840's, medicine was driven by much more concrete questions of disease. Thus, the earliest use of modern numerical statistics in Denmark was found within the medical community. Yet, the use and development of statistics generated the modern approach to definitions of disease that we now debate within the history and philosophy of medicine.