Addiction
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Biography Historical Article
Sir Austin Bradford Hill: medical statistics and the quantitative approach to prevention of disease.
Sir Austin Bradford Hill (1897-1991), son of a prominent medical physiologist, was destined for the study of medicine when World War I intervened. He chase to enlist as a pilot in the Royal Navy Air Service. Having contracted tuberculosis on his way to the Dardanelles, Hill was 'sent home to die'. ⋯ He is particularly remembered for the way he made medical statistics an essential part of modern epidemiology, a new phase in an epidemiology concerned with chronic as well as with infectious diseases. At the same time, he introduced randomization where therapies-beginning with streptomycin in tuberculosis-could be evaluated in large-scale clinical trials. Perhaps his best known achievement is his design of the smoking and lung cancer trials, carried out with Richard Doll who later extended-and still extends-the trials which so convincingly have linked addiction to tobacco to patients' later problems with cancers and with coronary heart disease.