Frederick L. Hoffman

Now largely forgotten, Hoffman's pioneering application of statistics to health and social problems in the early twentieth century influenced public policy and were widely disseminated in scholarly journals and popular outlets alike. This informative biography, culled largely from the unpublished memoirs of Hoffman and his relatives, resurrects the contributions of the""dean of American statisticians."" After a vagabond youth in his native Germany and the United States, which Sypher describes in vivid detail, the self-taught Hoffman settled into a job as a statistical researcher at Prudential Insurance. Prudential provided life and accident insurance for factory workers, and his groundbreaking studies of industrial hazards formed the basis for more accurate actuarial tables and helped bolster the campaign for government occupational safety and health standards. His later work established the links between smoking and cancer and between asbestos and lung disease; and a speech on cancer mortality led to the foundation of the American Cancer Society. Although not really a critical or scholarly biography, Sypher's account is an engaging immigrant success story and a window onto Hoffman's Progressive-era intellectual milieu. Although he published a frankly racist study of the African-American community and vigorously opposed all government welfare and social-insurance programs (which threatened Prudential's markets), he favored an enlightened corporate paternalism, backed up by extensive government regulation of housing and the workplace. This book illuminates a significant figure in the development of the regulatory state and the modern understanding of the environmental context of disease and social pathology; scholars of the period in particular will benefit from the comprehensive bibliography and index of his work. Photos.