Major Greenwood

Major Greenwood (August 9, 1880 - October 5, 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. 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.

Greenwood was elected to the Royal Society in 1928. The election certificate stated 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. Greenwood produced a large body of research, wrote extensively on the history of his subject and was the first holder of important positions in modern medical statistics 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.’”

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.