ABSTRACT
William Farr was a physician and statistician, and it is in the coming together of these disciplines – epidemiology – that his legacy is greatest. Farr was born into a poor rural Shropshire family – in Kenley near Much Wenlock – and adopted as a young boy by a local squire, Joseph Pryce. He was apprenticed in apothecary and qualified in this profession in 1832. Pryce left him an inheritance on his death, permitting him to fund medical studies in France, Switzerland and University College London. Farr was widely published, particularly in The Lancet, and made huge contributions to the emergent discipline of epidemiology and particularly in understanding the spread of the deadly diseases cholera and smallpox. Various attempts have been made to estimate the amount and the increase of the capital of the United Kingdom. The most recent attempt of the kind has been made by the chief of the statistical department of the Board of Trade.
