Hill, Austin Bradford (1897–1991)

Austin Bradford Hill has been called ‘the greatest medical statistician of the [20th] century’ (Doll, 1993, p. 795), a distinction achieved without academic degrees in either statistics or medicine. Richard Doll summarized his major contributions as teaching an innumerate medical profession to think quantitatively and persuading them to adopt randomization in studies of therapies and laying the basis for the development of epidemiology by showing how the science could be expanded to discover the causes of noninfectious diseases.

Hill's lectures at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in the 1930s presented ‘an understandable and logical approach to the collection and interpretation of medical observations’ (Doll, 1993, p. 795). The lectures were disseminated worldwide when published in The Lancet and later as a ...

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