Authority in medicine : old and new / by Major Greenwood.

  • Major Greenwood
Date:
1943
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Authority in medicine : old and new / by Major Greenwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    terised as “vague” or worse. But nothing emerges more clearly from the history of biological thought than that, almost without exception, the crucial experiments which have been most loudly hailed at the time they were made, as for ever settling the problem under discussion, have been found to have led to quite erroneous conclusions’ [The Rate of Living, New York, 1928, pp. 32-3). Into that field of medical research which has attracted me, epidemiology, Topley introduced the experimental method nearly a quarter of a century ago. For more than fifteen years I had the happiness to be associated with him in the research. Whether my opinion is just, viz. that we discovered some unsuspected factors of epidemic varia¬ tion, destroyed some fallacious beliefs and verified some hypotheses stiU not generally accepted, time will decide (6). But the great secrets of epidemiology are still secrets. We still do not know why Scarlet Fever has become almost what Sydenham called it, a mere name of a disease. We still cannot say why Influenza is sometimes a gentle cor¬ rective, sometimes an earth-shaking pandemic. Perhaps the scale of our operations was too small. To use the statistical lecturer’s stock illustration, we did not draw enough counters from the infmitively large bag; we could not do so for here a counter is not one mouse but one experiment, an experiment involving hundreds of animals and many months of time. We both had an emotional conviction that the danger point in herd-life, the moment when something was likely to happen, depended on an unstable equUibrium, perhaps some critical ratio of num-
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