Poisson was a French mathematician, and amongst the many contributions he made, proposed the Poisson distribution, with the example of modelling the number of soldiers accidentally injured or killed from kicks by horses. This distribution became useful as it models events, particularly uncommon events.
Counts of events, based on the Poisson distribution, is a frequently encountered model in medical research. Examples of this are number of falls, asthma attacks, number of cells, and so on. The Poisson parameter Lambda (λ) is the total number of events (k) divided by the number of units (n) in the data (λ = k/n). The unit forms the basis or denominator for calculation of the average, and need not be individual cases or research subjects. For example, the number of asthma attacks may be based on the number of child months, or the number of pregnancies based on the number of women years in using a particular contraceptive.