Physicians, too, were staunchly opposed to the use of the average to evaluate individuals under their care. “You can tell your patient that, of every hundred such cases, eighty are cured … but that will scarcely move him. What he wants to know is whether he is numbered among those who are cured,” wrote Claude Bernard, the French doctor regarded as the father of experimental medicine, in 1865.49 “Physicians have nothing to do with what is called the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in particular.”50 Yet
