IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aph/ajpbhl/1996861101-107_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Accidents and acts of God: A history of the terms

Author

Listed:
  • Loimer, H.
  • Guamieri, M.

Abstract

Despite criticism from safety professionals, scientists continue to use the word accident, meaning an unexpected, unintended injury or event. Some argue for its use based on tradition, but 'traditional' arguments appear to be invalid given our examination of the history of the word and its companion phrase act of God in statistics, law, and religion. People who were interested in public health recognized in the 1600s that unintended injuries were neither random nor unexpected. Legal scholars in the 1800s saw the word was useless for technical purposes. The word does not appear in the Bible until the mid-1900s, and then only in a paraphrased edition. Others have maintained that the meaning of accident is well understood, even though it has not been perfectly defined. We maintain that without a clear definition, people substitute an image, which may be distorted or damaging.

Suggested Citation

  • Loimer, H. & Guamieri, M., 1996. "Accidents and acts of God: A history of the terms," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 86(1), pages 101-107.
    • Handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1996:86:1:101-107_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rotolo, Thomas & Lengefeld, Michael, 2020. "Clearing the cobwebs: An analysis of the timing of youth concussion legislation in U.S. states," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 265(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1996:86:1:101-107_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.apha.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.