Major Greenwood 1001622 190616587 2008-02-11T13:44:17Z Qwfp 6032993 parenthetical note - "major" not a military rank. +Royal Stat Soc honours. small copyedits & wikifying. '''Major Greenwood''' ([[August 9]], [[1880]] - [[October 5]], [[1949]]) was an English [[epidemiologist]] and [[statistician]]. Major Greenwood junior was born in [[Shoreditch]] in [[East End of London|London's East End]], the only child of a [[Physician|doctor]] in general practice there. ("Major" was his forename, not a military rank.) He was educated on the classical side at [[Merchant Taylors' School]] and went on to study medicine at [[University College London]] and the [[London Hospital]]. On qualifying in [[1904]] he worked for a time as assistant to his father but after a few months he gave up [[clinical practice]] for good. He went to work as a demonstrator for the physiologist [[Leonard Erskine Hill|Leonard Hill]] (father of the future statistician [[Austin Bradford Hill]]) at the [[London Hospital Medical College]]. Leonard Hill recalled, “By recognising the ability of a student with nothing behind him to show his worth and by appointing him my assistant I may claim to have started Greenwood on his career.” While Greenwood made a good start in [[physiological research]] he was already drawn to statistics; his first paper in [[Biometrika]] appeared in [[1904]]. After a period of study with [[Karl Pearson]] he was appointed statistician to the [[Lister Institute]] in [[1910]]. There he worked on a wide range of problems, including a study of the effectiveness of [[inoculation]] with the statistician [[Udny Yule]]. In the [[World War I|First World War]] Greenwood first served in the [[Royal Army Medical Corps]] but then was put in charge of a medical research unit at the [[Ministry of Munitions]]. There he investigated the health problems associated with [[factory]] work, one result of which was an influential study of accidents which he produced with Yule. In [[1919]] Greenwood joined the newly created [[Ministry of Health]] with responsibility for medical statistics. In 1928 he became the first professor of [[Epidemiology]] and [[Vital Statistics]] at the [[London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine]] where he stayed until he retired in [[1945]]. He established a group of researchers, of whom the most important was [[Austin Bradford Hill]]. Greenwood played the same role in A. B. Hill’s career as Hill’s father had played in his. Greenwood was elected to the [[Royal Society]] in 1928. The election certificate stated <blockquote> Engaged in medical research. Has applied the statistical method to the elucidation of many problems of physiology, pathology, hygiene and epidemiology. Is the author, or joint author, of more than sixty papers dealing with these applications, including important contributions to the experimental study of epidemiology (Journ Hyg, 24, 1925, Greenwood and Topley; ibid, 25, 1926, Greenwood, Newbold, Topley and Wilson). Has done much to encourage and develop the use of modern statistical methods by medical laboratory investigators, and, as Chairman of the Medical Research Council's Statistical Committee, to secure the adequate planning and execution of field investigations. </blockquote> He was elected [[President of the Royal Statistical Society]] in 1934 and awarded its [[Guy Medal]] in Gold in 1945. Greenwood produced a large body of research, was the first holder of important positions in modern [[medical statistics]] and wrote extensively on the history of his subject, but as [[Austin Bradford Hill]] wrote in his obituary, “in the future, it may well indeed seem that one of his greatest contributions, if not the greatest, lay merely in his outlook, in his statistical approach to medicine, then a new approach and one long regarded with suspicion. And he fought this fight continuously and honestly—for logic for accuracy, for ‘little sums.’” ==Bibliography== * Major Greenwood and G. Udny Yule ([[1915]]) 'The Statistics of Anti-Typhoid and Anti-Cholera Inoculations, and the Interpretation of such Statistics in General, ''Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Epidemiology)'', 8, 113-190. * Major Greenwood and G. Udny Yule ([[1920]]), An Inquiry into the Nature of Frequency Distributions Representative of Multiple Happenings with Particular Reference to the Occurrence of Multiple Attacks of Disease or of Repeated Accidents. ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'', 83: 255-279. *[[Edgar L. Collis]] and Major Greenwood ''The health of the industrial worker''. [[1921]] *Major Greenwood ''Epidemics and crowd-diseases: an introduction to the study of epidemiology''. [[1935]] *Major Greenwood ''Medical statistics from Graunt to Farr: the Fitzpatrick lectures for the years [[1941]] and [[1943]]''. [[1948]] === Discussion=== *[[Lancelot Hogben]] (1950-1) Major Greenwood, ''Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society'', 7, 139-154. * A. B. H.; William Butler (1949) Obituary: Major Greenwood, ''[[Journal of the Royal Statistical Society]]. Series A (General)'', 112, 487-489. * P. L. McKinlay (1951) Major Greenwood: 1880-1949, ''Biometrika'', 38, 1-3. *Anne Hardy; Eileen Magnello (2002) Statistical methods in epidemiology: Karl Pearson, Ronald Ross, Major Greenwood and Austin Bradford Hill, 1900-1945 ''Soz Praventiv Med''; 47(2): 80-89. * V. Farewell, T. Johnson & [[Peter Armitage]] (2006) `A Memorandum on the Present Posiition and Prospects of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology' by Major Greenwood, ''Statistics in Medicine,'' 25, 2167-2177. * J. Rosser Matthews (1995) ''Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty'', Princeton, Princeton University Press. === External links=== The Royal Society information is from *[http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqSearch=RefNo=='EC/1928/07'&dsqDb=Catalog Royal Society citation] [[Category:1880 births|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:1949 deaths|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Epidemiologists|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:English statisticians|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Fellows of the Royal Society|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Alumni of University College London|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Alumni of the London Hospital Medical College|Greenwood, Major]] [[Category:Academics of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine|Greenwood, Major]]