John Guyett Scadding’s scepticism and pragmatism in addressing treatment uncertainties in clinical practice

John Guyett Scadding (1907–1999), my father, features quite prominently in the James Lind Library (JLL). The JLL includes reports of his controlled trials using alternate allocation and blinding to assess the effects of sulphonamides on gastrointestinal infections during 1944 and 1945; an article written by him for the JLL in 2002 reflecting on these studies and his comments in conversation with Iain Chalmers and Mike Clarke on the move from alternate allocation to concealed random allocation for the iconic Medical Research Council trial of streptomycin for pulmonary tuberculosis. Because clinical research done by my father covered a key moment in the history of controlled clinical trials, I was invited by the editors of the James Lind Library to provide some biographical information about him. My immediate reaction was that my father’s life and achievements had already been covered by some excellent obituaries (see Appendix 1), for example, Citron’s citation in Munk’s Roll written for the Royal College of Physicians of London. Accordingly, this article focuses on information and personal characteristics which I believe are of relevance to his clinical research in the 1940s. In addition to my own and my family’s and colleagues’ recollections of my father, I have drawn on published obituaries and a document entitled ‘The Institute of Diseases of the Chest, 1946–1972: a personal history’, from which I quote quite extensively.