DataFrame.describe() calls Series.std() to get the standard deviation. And as the documentation tells us,

Return unbiased standard deviation over requested axis.

Normalized by N-1 by default. This can be changed using the ddof argument

So the standard deviation returned by describe() is, in fact, the "corrected sample standard deviation".

Describe returns a series, so you can just select out what you want

In [6]: s = Series(np.random.rand(10))

In [7]: s
Out[7]: 
0    0.302041
1    0.353838
2    0.421416
3    0.174497
4    0.600932
5    0.871461
6    0.116874
7    0.233738
8    0.859147
9    0.145515
dtype: float64

In [8]: s.describe()
Out[8]: 
count    10.000000
mean      0.407946
std       0.280562
min       0.116874
25%       0.189307
50%       0.327940
75%       0.556053
max       0.871461
dtype: float64

In [9]: s.describe()[['count','mean']]
Out[9]: 
count    10.000000
mean      0.407946
dtype: float64