A BOOK by the Professor Emeritus of Medical Statistics of London University, who is also an Honorary Member of the Institute, covering an aspect of medical statistics in which he is the unchallenged master can hardly need a review, its impact is so certain. These papers which form the book are reprints of reports of work with which the author was associated and which provide object lessons of how to plan observations and experiments, how best to carry them out and how with accuracy and clarity to present the results. The author makes no such claim (the reviewer is free to do so and does) but asks only that they be accepted as ‘honest down-to-earth attempts to carry out research by the statistical method . . . instructive in their failings as well as in their virtues’.
There are three groups of papers covering respectively the clinical trial of treatment, the field trial of vaccines, and epidemiology. If the experience of ‘A.B.H.’ rested on these alone it would be enough, though it does not. But it is not only a matter of experience. What is it that distinguishes this so-called layman working with and accepted in his own right by clinicians? In his own words he has demonstrated that ‘there is not . . . the unbridgeable gap between the statistical and the clinical approach that some persons seem to observe or
would wish to create’.