Who Are They?
And How Are They Connected?
Famous statisticians, public health people and others famous individuals related to
LSHTM and its surroundings
A short quiz where everyone’s a
winner!
MSU Retreat
Cambridge
1st April 2008
•Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932)
•Connected to famous early work of LSHTM
•First Briton to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine (1902)
•Discovered that mosquitoes transmit malaria (1897)
• Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
• Crimea war started in July 1854
•‘Real enemies not the Russians but cholera, typhus and dysentry’
•Charge of the Light Brigade: October 1854
• In 1858 she became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal
Statistical Society for her contribution to Army statistics and comparative
hospital statistics
1823,1923,1990,2005
• Thomas Wakely (1795 - 1862) founded the Lancet in 1823
-Radical journalist William Cobbett proposed that a
journal like the Lancet could be used to campaign for
reforms in the medical profession
•A surgeon who spent 17 years in the House of Commons
John Snow (1813-1858)
•Traced source of a cholera outbreak
in Soho in 1854
• Study of causality
•One of first physicians to study use of
ether and chloroform
•Administered chloroform to Queen
Victoria for birth of last 2 children
Sander Greenland
• Well-known for recent
work on causality in
epidemiology
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• Francis Galton and Charles Darwin were half-cousins
• Galton
• correlation, regression and regression to the mean
• studied human intelligence
• founded Biometrika with Pearson and Weldon in 1901
• undertook eugenics work considered controversial today
• International Eugenics Conference, London, 1912
dedicated to Galton
Siméon Denis POISSON
French statistician,
1781-1840
Ronald A. FISHER
English statistician,
1890-1962
English[ cette homme ] + “er” = This man
William Gossett (1876-1937)
•A chemist at the Guinness
brewery in Dublin from 1899
•Student’s t distribution
•To handle small samples for
quality control in brewing
A pint of Guiness
•Arthur Guiness born 1725 in Kildare
•Brewing industry was suffering since
English beer was less heavily taxed
than Irish
•Brewed strong black beer in 1770
which became very successful
James Lind (1716-1794)
•Thought to have performed the first
ever clinical trial
• Demonstrated that citrus fruits cure
scurvy
• Pioneer of naval hygiene
•Worked on preventive medicine and
hygiene and cleanliness
Stuart Pocock
• One of our own famous clinical
trialists
Austin Bradford Hill (1897-1991)
Sir Richard Doll (1912-2005)
•Joint work on smoking and lung cancer
•1950 case-control study
•British doctors study
• Hill:
•MSU from 1947
•MRC statistician on what many believe to be the first RCT (use of
streptomycin in the treatment of tuberculosis) as opposed to Lind
•Fisher was highly critical of the smoking/cancer work but
proposed that Hill be made a fellow of the Royal Society
John Maynard Keynes
(1883-1946)
Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)
•Members of the Bloomsbury Group
•First half of 20th century
•Started with a few Cambridge graduates and their friends
•Keynes
•economist
•Woolf
•Lived at 46 Gordon Square
•Author of Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse
•Artemis
•Goddess of hunting and chastity,
comforter of women in childbirth
•Apollo
•God of prophecy, music and
medicine
LSHTM seal
•Artemis is driving chariot whilst Apollo is shooting arrows
•Date palm for the tropical activities of the School and connection to
birth of Apollo and Artemis- palm sprang up to give shade in childbirth
•Staff with a snake coiled for medical interests of the School
LSHTM
“Statistical Aspects of the Analysis of Data from
Retrospective Studies of Disease” JNCI, 1959; 22: 719 - 748
Nathan Mantel & William Haenszel
• Austin Bradford Hill (1897-1991)
• MSU from 1947
•MRC statistician on what many believe to
be the first RCT
•Use of streptomycin in the treatment
of tuberculosis
•Work on smoking and lung cancer with
Richard Doll
•1950 case-control study
•British doctors study
•Fisher was highly critical of the
smoking/cancer work but proposed that he
be made a fellow of the Royal Society
• Peter Armitage (1924-)
• Professor in MSU 1961-1976
• Said of Austin Bradford Hill on his death:
•“to anyone involved in medical statistics,
epidemiology or public health, Bradford Hill
was quite simply the world’s leading
medical statistician ”
Pearson
Neyman