|
Major Greenwood FRS (9 August 1880 – 5 October 1949) was an English epidemiologist and statistician. Major Greenwood junior was born in Shoreditch in London's East End, the only child of a 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 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 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. The Royal Society awarded the Buchanan Medal to Greenwood in 1927,〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Buchanan archive winners 1957 – 1897 )〕 and elected him a Fellow in 1928.〔 The election certificate stated
He was elected President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1934〔(【引用サイトリンク】Royal Statistical Society Presidents )〕 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.’" His name is attached to the Greenwood formula for the variance or standard error (SE) of the Kaplan–Meier estimator of survival.〔Kaplan, Edward L. in a retrospective on the seminal paper in "This week's citation classic". ''Current Contents'' 24, 14 (1983). (Available from UPenn as PDF. )〕 A statistical method invented by Major Greenwood in a statistical study of infectious diseases is still used in present day research. The Greenwood statistic was used to discover that there is some kind of order in the placement of genes on the chromosomes of living things and this inspired a new look at epigenetics, which is now considered to be as important as genetics in how living organisms develop and evolve. Greenwood lived at Loughton, where among his neighbours were Sir Frank Baines, Millais Culpin, and Leonard Erskine Hill. ==Publications== * * * *Edgar L. Collis and Major Greenwood ''The health of the industrial worker''. 1921 * Major Greenwood ''The natural duration of cancer.'' London, England: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects, No. 33. 1926 *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 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Major Greenwood」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|