William Farr

[2] Farr returned to England in 1831 and continued his studies at University College London, qualifying as a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in March 1832.

[1][3] Then, with a recommendation from Edwin Chadwick and backing from Neil Arnott, Farr secured another post in the GRO as the first compiler of scientific abstracts (i.e. a statistician).

[4][5] Chadwick and Farr had an agenda, demography aimed at public health, and the support of the initial Registrar General Thomas Henry Lister.

Early industrialisation had made London the most populous city in the world at the time, and the River Thames was heavily polluted with untreated sewage.

In addition, through his analysis of several variables and their association with death from cholera, Farr held the belief that elevation was the major contributor to the occurrence of the disease.

[17] During focused study of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, the physician John Snow used data supplied by the GRO[18] and applied the (now accepted) mechanism for transmission he had proposed in 1849:[19] people were infected by swallowing something, and it multiplied in the intestines.

He produced a monograph which showed that mortality was extremely high for people who drew their water from the Old Ford Reservoir in East London.

[25] In 1862 Farr was paid £300 (equivalent to £35,400 in 2023) for producing a report on the Metropolitan Police Superannuation Fund, an early pension provision for that organisation.

[27] The same year, Farr received as honours a Companionship of the Bath and the Gold Medal of the British Medical Association for his work in the field of biostatistics.

[28] Farr died aged 75 at his home in Maida Vale, London, and was buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, Bromley Common.

In January 1837 he established the British Annals of Medicine, Pharmacy, Vital Statistics, and General Science, discontinued in August of that year.

Farr, by relying on the existing mathematical model of mortality, could use data sampling to cut back the required computation.

[27] In "The Sewer King", an episode in the 2003 British television documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, Farr was played by Norman Lovett.

Twenty-three names of public health and tropical medicine pioneers were chosen to appear on the School building in Keppel Street when it was constructed in 1926.