Clinical trial of patulin in the common cold. 1944.

Commentary: the 1944 patulin trial: the first properly controlled multicentre trial conducted under the aegis of the British Medical Research Council.

The 1948 report of the British Medical Research Council's randomized trial of streptomycin for pulmonary tuberculosis is widely regarded as marking the beginning of the modern history of controlled clinical trials. Four years earlier, however, a methodologically sophisticated multicentre trial conducted under the aegis of the Medical Research Council was reported, which assessed the effects of ...

Commentary: MRC Patulin trial.

The MRC Patulin trial1 was undertaken in 1943–1944 to investigate a proposed remedy for the common cold. Only a few clinical trials took place before the second world war and they often had serious defects of planning or execution. The Patulin trial, it is claimed, was the first to meet the rigorous requirements for a scientifically acceptable trial with concurrent controls, as set out original...

Commentary: unbiased divination, unbiased evidence, and the patulin clinical trial.

Histories of the randomized clinical trial (RCT) are constantly unearthing dramatic precursors for concurrent controls, random assignment to comparison group, blind assessment, placebo controls, and statistical inference.1–4 All these forerunners seem to indicate a constantly budding but, somehow, stumbling and aborted development toward the modern methodology. While most of the methods (at lea...

The 1944 patulin trial of the British Medical Research Council.

Leading articles Evidence based medicine

Traditionally the physician's absolute right to decide what treatment any individual patient should be oVered has been the Holy Grail of clinical practice since the earliest of time. Such a decision has clearly always been influenced by individual physician experience, and the presented or published results of fellow practitioners. The first medical research trials to investigate the use of pat...