Austin Bradford Hill, 8 July 1897 - 18 April 1991

Austin Bradford Hill was described in one of his obituary notices as the greatest statistician of the 20th Century, despite the fact that he held no specialist qualification in either medicine or statistics. If, however, greatness is measured by the influence of a man’s teaching and example there can be no doubt that he had earned this accolade. For he taught an innumerate profession to think quantitatively, persuaded it to adopt the principle of randomization in its assessment of the efficacy of therapy, and laid the basis for the explosive development of epidemiology, by showing how the old science could be refurbished as a tool to discover the causes of non-infectious disease.