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Frederick L. Hoffman1865–1946Walter F. WillcoxPublished online: 11 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Walter F. Willcox (1946) Frederick L. Hoffman 1865–1946,Journal of the American Statistical Association, 41:234, 240-241, DOI:10.1080/01621459.1946.10501869

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1946.10501869

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FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 1865-1946

REDERICK L. HOFFMAN who died in San Diego, California, on Febru- F ary 23d at the age of 80 was almost the oldest among the veterans of the American Statistical Association. His earliest book printed as a monograph by the Association appeared fifty years ago and fifteen years later he was chosen for its President. For more than twenty years, 1896-1919, he was one of the most frequent and valued contributors to its publications.

Born and trained in Germany but coming to the United States be- fore he was twenty he brought with him an industry, which more than Teutonic was almost titanic, an eager desire to improve man’s estate especially by reducing its burden of sickness, poverty and crime, an unshakable conviction that if one was to do good rather than harm in such an effort one must study the successes and failures of the past and gather widely all relevant facts about the present situation, and that to this end one must rest heavily and constantly upon the statistical method. Becoming statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company of America about ten years after he landed and before he was thirty years old he quickly assembled in his office what was probably the larg- est collection in the country not only of Federal reports but also of the scattered and fragmentary state and municipal reports dealing with demography in the broadest sense of the term and began to pour out articles and books interpreting this material.

Upon the interpretation of what he gathered, for example whether the greater prevalence of tuberculosis among Negroes is due mainly to inheritance or to environment, or whether the increase in the deaths reported as due to cancer means that cancer mortality is really increas- ing, opinions might and did differ. His great service lay in focussing the attention of the public and of scholars upon many social evils and furnishing a basis of fact much needed for their successful analysis. This he did for mining and industrial accidents, and for many diseases especially prevalent in certain occupations or of importance because of the large number they enfeeble or kill. These studies were on tuberculo- sis, malaria and especially cancer.

Thirty-three years ago he read before a medical society a plea for a new organization to study and try to prevent cancer. As a result the American Cancer Society was formed almost at once with him as one of the founders and in his later years he gave most of his attention and devoted most of his publications to that field.

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FREDERICK L. HOFFMAN 241

In the middle of the twenty year period which covered his contribu- tions to the Association’s Publications he read before it a paper on ‘Problems of Social Statistics and Social Research” which epitomized his life work before and after. He conceived social research as aiming a t “the solution of the problem of poverty with all its resulting problems” and then outlined ua working plan of social research.” This was ar- ranged under ten heads : wage-earners’ expenditures or budgets, peri- odical savings aiming to determine whether the prosperity of the masses is or is not increasing with a subdivision of this topic to de- termine how far the deposits in savings-banks came from wage-earners, safety of investment made by wage-earners, preventable industrial diseases, preventable industrial accidents, employments for persons physically impaired, morbidity and mortality of wage-earners, suicide, and finally “possible physical deterioration” of city populations and particularly of city children. To this paper he added eight short sta- tistical appendices outlining some of the information he had garnered on these problems.

It would repay some student beginning work in these fields to re- view the subjects on which Hoffman pioneered in order to discover what progress later scholars have made. This would prepare one admirably to carry on his work.

WALTER F. WILLCOX Ithaca, New York

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