Thomas Rowe Edmonds

Thomas Rowe Edmonds (1803–1889) was an English actuary and political economist.

He was born in Penzance in Cornwall on 20 June 1803, the son of Richard Edmonds who was town clerk of Marazion, and his wife Elizabeth.Richard Edmonds was a younger brother.

Edmonds attended Penzance Grammar School under George Morris. He then entered Trinity College, Cambridge as a sizar in 1822, graduating B.A. in 1826. He worked as an actuary for the Legal and General Life Assurance Society from 1832 to 1866.

Edmonds died in Maida Vale on 6 March 1889.

Edmonds applied the method of Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin for life tables to England, as Joshua Milne had done with data from Carlisle, Cumberland. He became a fellow of the Statistical Society in 1836.

Edmonds wrote a series of 15 papers in The Lancet, from 1836 to 1842, on the topic of mortality and health, the first being "On the laws of collective vitality". It was to be a major influence in the field of epidemiology, as developed by William Farr. While Edmonds and Farr both did pioneer work on vital statistics, the starting point for Edmonds was the needs of life insurance. For Farr, there were applications to mortality and morbidity. It was from the first paper of the Lancet series that Farr acquired a number of central points that Edmonds was making, in particular about collection of data. Edmonds took to campaigning journalism. In The Lancet, and other periodicals edited by Farr and Thomas Wakley, he wrote polemically, in particular against the officials John Rickman and John Finlaison.

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