Medical statistics as it applies to money, in particular insured sums, is the topic of this chapter which covers the history of annuities and life insurance. The way that this topic has been adapted by medical statistics, in particular as a result of a landmark paper in 1972 by David Cox, is addressed.

Chapter 6 chronicles how money as social technology was reconfigured during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines economic and philanthropic discourse as well as government practice between 1750 and 1850 to explain the motives for a quick succession of currency reforms in the nineteenth century, that profoundly transformed the material properties of public money in circulation. Cheap but precise mass production was especially important in order to issue low-denomination coins, used primarily for wage payments and retail, that would be fully conversant with the official monetary standard. In order to explain why the Dutch came to take a more hostile stance towards multiple currencies circulating in their territory, the chapter delineates how a 'national economy', forged through monetary exchange, became first an ideological and then a bureaucratic reality. While national currency did not do away with plurality of money in use, especially in the Dutch–Prussian borderland that is the main locale of this book, the strong discourse of technological superiority of uniform, centrally managed currency made it more difficult to think about plurality as something other than chaos.

Psychology, perhaps more than any other social science, has historically defined itself by the methodologies it employs in generating new knowledge. This chapter surveys the history of methodology in psychology. We begin by first defining the concept of a methodology, then survey early scientific methods of psychology with the work of Gustav Fechner in the 1860s. Fechner, along with other psychophycisists of the time, were of the first to promote a rigorous scientific method in the study and understanding of psychological phenomena. The quest for quantification in psychology would continue with the work of Francis Galton and his monumental discovery of empirical correlation almost thirty years later, which set the stage for a wealth of statistical methodologies that would arise in the early twentieth century. These included the birth of psychometrics and testing, as well as the development of the factor analysis method used by Charles Spearman and others. By the early 1920s, geneticist R. A. Fisher revolutioned the application of quantitative methods by promoting null hypothesis significance testing, while simultaneously packaging experimental design into the method of the analysis of variance. We close the chapter with a survey of Sewall Wright’s method of path analysis, which, along with factor analysis (and the advancement of the computer), set the stage for the birth of structural equation models of the mid-to-late twentieth century. While psychological science has been dominated by quantitative methods, the reemergence of qualitative methods is also noteworthy. We conclude with a comment that psychological methods of the future, to be successful, will likely require a merger of both quantitative and qualitative approaches.