Donald Mainland: anatomist, educator, thinker, medical statistician, trialist, rheumatologist

Donald Mainland described himself as someone who started teaching as an undergraduate demonstrator in anatomy and continued trying to teach, orally or in writing, for the next 48 years. Mainland had a unique career. He graduated in medicine from Edinburgh in 1925 and spent 20 years as Professor of Anatomy in Halifax, Nova Scotia. From the early 1930s, he developed a remarkable grasp of statistical principles and methods, and in the second part of his career, he was Professor of Medical Statistics at the New York University. Here, his main focus was obtaining reliable estimates of the effect of health interventions in rheumatology. How did the remarkable transformation from anatomist to statistician come about? Unusually, Donald Mainland dropped many autobiographical notes into his writings, so we know a lot about his motivations. For example, in 1954 he wrote: