Austin Bradford Hill

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Sir Austin Bradford Hill , called: Tony Hill, (born July 8, 1897 in London , † April 18, 1991 ) was a British epidemiologist , statistician , pioneer of the randomized clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, the first to establish a connection between smoking and lung cancer . He achieved this with the so-called British Doctors Study , a long-term study of the health and smoking habits of British doctors.

Life

Hill was a pilot in World War I but was fired because he suffered from tuberculosis . He got a degree in economics. In 1922 he started working for the Industry Fatigue Research Board . There he worked with the medical statistician Major Greenwood and took courses with Karl Pearson to improve his knowledge of statistics. When Greenwood accepted a chair at the newly formed London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine , Hill went with him and from 1933 lectured in epidemiology and life statistics. In 1947 he became a professor of medical statistics.

Hill made a remarkable career as a researcher and lecturer and author of a successful textbook, Principles of Medical Statistics , but he is most famous for two field studies: He was the statistician on the Medical Research Council Streptomycin on Tuberculosis Trials Committee . Their study examining the use of streptomycin in the treatment of tuberculosis is widely believed to be the first randomized clinical trial. Ronald Fisher pioneered the use of randomness in agricultural experiments . The second study was a series of studies Hill and Richard Doll did on smoking and lung cancer. The first report was published in 1950 and compared lung cancer patients with comparison groups. Doll and Hill also began a long-term study of smoking and health. This was a study of the smoking habits and health of over 30,000 British doctors over several years. Fisher's opinion was in clear contradiction to the results and procedures of the smoking / cancer work and from 1957 he criticized this work in the press and in scientific articles.

Hill was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1954, inter alia at the request of Fisher . In 1961 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor .

Austin Bradford Hill's surname was Hill, under which he published. Nevertheless, it is often referred to under the name Bradford Hill. Friends called him Tony.

He formulated the Bradford Hill criteria for causality in medicine (also known as the Hill criteria), which consist of nine mnemonics with which a suspected cause-effect relationship in medicine or epidemiology should be checked.

Literature (selection)

  • Principles of Medical Statistics (1937) London: The Lancet, 1937.
  • "Medical Research Council (1948) Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee. Streptomycin treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. British Medical Journal 2, 769-83.
  • "Doll R, Hill AB. (1950) Smoking and carcinoma of the lung. Preliminary report, British Medical Journal, 2: 739-748.
  • "Doll R, Hill AB. (1954) The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits. British Medical Journal, 228: 1451-5.

Lectures (selection)

  • "Richard Doll (1994) Austin Bradford Hill, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 40, 129-140.
  • "Peter Armitage (1991) Obituary: Sir Austin Bradford Hill 1897-1991, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society), 154, 482-484.
  • P. Armitage, W. Bodmer, I. Chalmers, R. Doll, H. Marks contribute to a Symposium on Bradford Hill and Fisher International Journal of Epidemiology, 32, (6), (2003), 922-948.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage