William G. Cochran and the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report

Surgeon-Major William Macrae

Blowing smoke: the lost legacy of the 1964 Surgeon General's report on smoking and health.

William Gibson, surgeon-farrier, on fevers.

WILLIAM GIBSON, born about I680, was the first ofa succession ofeighteenthcentury British surgeons to turn to the then distasteful subject of farriery as a career, or as a medium for the exercise of literary talent. Concerning his early life we have little information. Presumably he was trained as a surgeon via the usual apprenticeship route; the first notice of his public life dates to I714, a...

Extending the Cochran rule

We first describe a number of inter-related issues that need to be considered by the researcher when comparing frequencies of linguistic features in two or more corpora. We then describe the chi-squared and log-likelihood tests used in previous research for the comparison of word frequencies. Our focus, in this paper, is on the issue of reliability of the statistical tests, and we describe simu...

An Eighteenth-century surgeon and apothecary: William Elmhirst (1721-1773).

ALTHOUGH general accounts of the eighteenth-century development of the medical profession exist, in particular that by Bernice Hamilton,' it is rare to be allowed an insight into the day-by-day practice of medicine.2 The survival of William Elmhirst's medical ledger for the years between 1768 and his untimely death in 1773 chronicles in great detail not only the accounts of his dealings with pa...