During World War II, the US Army launched a seemingly routine experiment to find the ideal way to screen soldiers for tuberculosis. Jacob Yerushalmy, the statistician in charge of this project, would succeed at this task — and end up fundamentally changing our conception of medical diagnosis in the process. […]
What does it mean to make a diagnosis? Are we always talking about the same thing? If you couldn’t make the lecture in person, here is a recording of the Grand Rounds I gave this year at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where I explore the changing definitions of diagnosis […]
Can we ever know what causes a chronic disease? In this episode, I’m joined again by Dr. Shoshana Herzig to finish a three-part miniseries on Bradford Hill and Doll’s attempts to prove that smoking caused lung cancer. We’ll talk about the first prospective cohort trial in history, 1960s “Fake […]
Does smoking cause lung cancer? How could you ever know? The second in a three-part series on causality, I’m joined by Dr. Shoshana Herzig to discuss how Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll set out to try and answer this question — and along the way revolutionized the way we […]
