“I wish that hospitals could be turned into places for experiment more than they are, in the following perfectly humane direction. Suppose two different and competing treatments of a particular malady; I have just mentioned a case in point. Let the patients suffering under it be given the option of being placed under Dr. A. or Dr. B., the respective representatives of the two methods, and the results be statistically compared. A co-operation without partisanship between many large hospitals ought to speedily settle doubts that now hang unnecessarily long under dispute.”

— Francis Galton

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. III Medical Studies

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I wish that hospitals could be turned into places for experiment more than they are, in the following perfectly humane …" by Francis Galton?

Francis Galton 14

British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in euge… 1822–1911

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Love the One You're With

“I also attended on two occasions the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

page 48 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=88&itemID=F1497&viewtype=image
Autobiography (1958)

“My friend Sir G. Johnson subsequently became the leader of one of the two opposed methods of dealing with cholera. His was the “ eliminative” view, namely, that there was mischief in the system that Nature strove to eliminate, so he prescribed castor oil to expedite matters; others took the exactly opposite view, consequently there was open war between the two methods. I read somewhere that one of Johnson’s most fiery opponents considered the number of deaths occasioned by his method to amount to eleven thousand. Leaving aside all question of the accuracy of the estimate of this particular treatment, it is easy to see that when a pestilence lies heavily on a nation, the numbers affected are so large that a proper or improper treatment may be capable of saving or of destroying many thousands of lives. By all means, then, let competitive methods be tested at hospitals on a sufficiently large scale to settle their relative merits. Of this I will speak further almost immediately.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. III Medical Studies

“Relations between India and China have been founded on solid understanding of the affinities of the cultures and the civilizations of the two countries, and the imperatives of peaceful co-existence and close co-operation between them in the post-cold war world. I believe that India-China friendship and co-operation could be a shining example of concord and harmonious relations between two ancient civilizations and the foundation for a just, stable and peaceful world order.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Press Information Bureau in: Address By His Excellency Shri K.R. Narayanan, President Of The Republic Of India At Peking University http://pib.myiris.com/speech/article.php3?fl=010508171719, press Information Bureau, 30 May 2000

“[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Janice asks.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The objection made to the numerical method, to wit, the difficulty or impossibility of forming classes of similar facts, is alike applicable to all the methods that might be substituted; that it is impossible to appreciate each case with mathematical exactness, and it is precisely on this account that enumeration becomes necessary; by so doing, the errors, (which are inevitable,) being the same in two groups of patients subjected to different treatment, mutually compensate each other, and they may be disregarded without sensibly affecting the exactness of the results.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872) French physician

p, 125
Researches on the effects of bloodletting... (1836)

“I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (May 3, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“For the world, I count it not an Inn, but a Hospital, and a place, not to live, but to die in.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 11
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“Suppose it is desired to test the efficiency of several treatments intended to destroy certain larvae on a field. The experiments are arranged in the usual way. The treatments compared are applied to particular plots with several replications and then the plots (or smaller parts of them) are inspected and all the surviving larvae are counted. Thus the observations represent the numbers of surviving larvae in several equal areas. It happens frequently that, while there is room for doubt as to whether there is any significant difference between the average number of survivors corresponding to particular treatments, there is no doubt whatever that the variablitity of the observations differs from treatment to treatment.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

p. 35 of "On a new class of "contagious" distributions, applicable in entomology and bacteriology." http://www.jstor.org/stable/2235986 The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 10, no. 1 (1939): 35–57.

“Two normal observers viewing the same object from the same place under the same physical circumstances do not necessarily have identical visual experiences, even though the images on their respective retinas may be virtually identical.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 5.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Francis Galton 14

Related quotes

Related topics