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.’” Bibliography Major Greenwood and G. Udny Yule ( 1915 ) 'The Statistics of Anti-Typhoid and Anti-Cholera Inoculations , and the Interpretation of such Statistics in General , Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine ( Epidemiology ) , 8 , 113-190 . Major Greenwood and G. Udny Yule ( 1920 ) , An Inquiry into the Nature of Frequency Distributions Representative of Multiple Happenings with Particular Reference to the Occurrence of Multiple Attacks of Disease or of Repeated Accidents . Journal of the Royal Statistical Society , 83 : 255-279 . Edgar L. Collis and Major Greenwood The health of the industrial worker . 1921 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 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 . External links The Royal Society information is from Royal Society citation Categories : 1880 births | 1949 deaths | Epidemiologists | Statisticians | Fellows of the Royal Society | Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society | University College London alumni | Alumni of Queen Mary , University of London | Academics of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 