FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 334:670 March 7, 1996 Number 10 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited

By J. Rosser Matthews. 195 pp. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1995. $39.50. ISBN 0-691-03794-9.

Succinctly put, Matthews's book chronicles some of the pivotal events in the evolution of the art of medicine into the science of medicine. Starting with the debates surrounding Pierre Louis's numerical method in the 1800s, we traverse a series of intellectual, sociological, and political confrontations leading up to the introduction of the modern randomized clinical trial.

The first portion of the book focuses on the resistance to the aggregation that was inherent in Louis's numerical method. Louis stressed the need for carefully observed and recorded data. He championed the use of summary statistics as a means of investigating therapeutic efficacy. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  TERMS OF USE  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org Comments and questions? Please contact us. The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2009 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.