Historical aspects of the constitution type theory development in Western Europe and the USA (first half of the 20th century)
Introduction. The aim of this paper is to reflect on events that played key role in development of quantitative methods in the study of human constitution types in France, Germany, England, Italy and the USA. Results and Discussion. In the late 19th - early 20th century French and Italian scholars strove to find associations between physique and resistance/susceptibility to disease and its progression. Other scientific schools focused more on the relations between individual psychological features and bodytype. In the first 3rd of XX century French biologists and doctors mainly used qalitative methods in their research without statistical analysis. At the same time the Italian school fostered “metrical approach to biological phenomena” (“clinica col metro”) using biological statistics as an important investigation tool. Italian researchers substantially promoted the development of quantitative data analysis including analysis of distribution's properties. A significant contribution to the development of biological statistics was made by psychologists in the late XIX-the first 3rd of the XX century. Unification of research methods and data collection allowed E.Kretschmer, the German psychiatrist who stidied human constitution, to implement quantitative analysis. However, in his publications he only showed tabulated average values without more elaborate statistical indices. Contrary to E.Kretschmer, English scholars faced with the challenge of assessing individual psychological traits had developed methods of correlation and factor analysis, which subsequently became an essential part of biological statistics. Conclusion. American psychologists and anthropologists of the 1920-30s successfully consolidated the approaches of Italian, English, and their own national scientific schools in usage of quantitative methods in the study of human constitution.