Louis-René Villermé

Louis-René Villermé (10 March 1782 – 16 November 1863) was a French economist and physician. He was known for his early studies of social epidemiology, or the effects of socioeconomic status on health, in early industrial France, and was an advocate for hygienic reform in factories and prisons. His work is considered pivotal in the history of the fields of sociology and statistical inquiry, and he is considered a founder of epidemiology. Villermé published works on the conditions in prisons in France, and the benefits of helping prisoners return to outside life when their sentences ended. Another concerned the role of industrialization on the general health and quality of life of working-class people. His best-known work was concerned with workers in the cotton, wool, and silk industries, including the children that worked in the mills. Born in Paris on 10 March 1782, Villermé was a man of many occupations; he covered a wide range of professions in his lifetime including: medical student, army surgeon, author, social economist, and member of several medical boards. He studied with the anatomist Guillaume Dupuytren during 1801–1804. Villermé then spent 10 years serving in the army room during 1804–1814 under the reign of Napoleon. In 1819, Villermé married. After his military service, he began work as Secretary-General of the Société Médicale d'Emulation in 1818. Villermé was elected to the Académie royale de médecine in 1823. Later in life, he became an economist who wrote about social issues. Villermé was one of the pioneering advocates of hygienic reform and one of the first in France to relate hygienic reform with that of social reform. He conducted numerous early studies on social epidemiology, the health disparities among classes in correlation with wages and living conditions, using his knowledge as a physician to incorporate data analysis as well as social investigations of the working class. He even conducted studies that related mortality rates with income.