Major Greenwood FRS (9 August 1880 – 5 October 1949) was a British

epidemiologist Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population, and application of this knowledge to prevent diseases. It is a cornerstone ...

and

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

Biography

Major Greenwood junior was born in

Shoreditch Shoreditch is an area in London, England and is located in the London Borough of Hackney alongside neighbouring parts of Tower Hamlets, which are also perceived as part of the area due to historic ecclesiastical links. Shoreditch lies just north ...

in London's East End, the only child of Major Greenwood, a

physician A physician, medical practitioner (British English), medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the Medical education, study, Med ...

general practice General practice is personal, family, and community-orientated comprehensive primary care that includes diagnosis, continues over time and is anticipatory as well as responsive. Definitions A general practitioner (GP) is a doctor who is a consu ...

there ("Major" was his forename, not a military rank.) and his wife Annie, daughter of Peter Lodwick Burchell,

F.R.C.S. Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons (FRCS) is a professional qualification to practise as a senior surgeon in Ireland or the United Kingdom. It is bestowed on an intercollegiate basis by the four Royal Colleges of Surgeons (the Roy ...

, M.B., L.S.A.Burke's Landed Gentry, 18th ed., vol. I, 1965, pg 338-343, 'Greenwood formerly of Haddenham' pedigree The Greenwood family is recorded back to the twelfth century in the person of Wyomarus Greenwode, of Greenwode Leghe, near

Heptonstall Heptonstall is a small village and civil parish within the Calderdale borough of West Yorkshire, England, historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. The population of Heptonstall, including the hamlets of Colden and Slack, is 1,448, i ...

, Yorkshire, caterer to the Empress Maude in 1154. Greenwood was educated on the classical side at Merchant Taylors' School and went on to study medicine at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

and the

London Hospital The Royal London Hospital is a large teaching hospital in Whitechapel in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is part of Barts Health NHS Trust. It provides district general hospital services for the City of London and London Borough of Tow ...

. On qualifying in 1904 he worked for a time as assistant to his father but after a few months he gave up

clinical practice ''Clinical Practice'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access medical journal. It covers good clinical practice and health care. The journal was established in 2004 as ''Therapy'' by Future Drugs Ltd, obtaining its current name in 2012 when it wa ...

for good. He went to work as a demonstrator for the physiologist Leonard Hill (father of the future statistician

Austin Bradford Hill Sir Austin Bradford Hill (8 July 1897 – 18 April 1991) was an English epidemiologist who pioneered the modern randomised clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. ...

) at the

London Hospital Medical College The London Hospital Medical College was a medical school, medical and later dental school based at the London Hospital (later Royal London Hospital) in Whitechapel, London. Founded in 1785, it was the first purpose-built medical college in Englan ...

. Leonard Hill recalled, "By recognising the ability of a student with nothing behind him to show his worth and by appointing him my assistant I may claim to have started Greenwood on his career." While Greenwood made a good start in physiological research he was already drawn to statistics; his first paper in

Biometrika ''Biometrika'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for the Biometrika Trust. The editor-in-chief is Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster University). The principal focus of this journal is theoretical statistics. It was ...

appeared in 1904. After a period of study with

Karl Pearson Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university ...

he was appointed statistician to the

Lister Institute The Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, informally known as the Lister Institute, was established as a research institute (the British Institute of Preventive Medicine) in 1891, with bacteriologist Marc Armand Ruffer as its first director, ...

in 1910. There he worked on a wide range of problems, including a study of the effectiveness of

inoculation Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or other microbe or virus into a person or other organism. It is a method of artificially inducing immunity against various infectious diseases. The term "inoculation" is also used more generally ...

with the statistician

Udny Yule George Udny Yule, CBE, FRS (18 February 1871 – 26 June 1951), usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, particularly known for the Yule distribution and proposing the preferential attachment model for random graphs. Perso ...

. In the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

Greenwood first served in the

Royal Army Medical Corps The Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) was a specialist corps in the British Army which provided medical services to all Army personnel and their families, in war and in peace. On 15 November 2024, the corps was amalgamated with the Royal Army De ...

but then was put in charge of a medical research unit at the

Ministry of Munitions The Minister of Munitions was a British government position created during the First World War to oversee and co-ordinate the production and distribution of munitions for the war effort. The position was created in response to the Shell Crisis o ...

. There he investigated the health problems associated with

factory A factory, manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. Th ...

work, one result of which was an influential study of accidents which he produced with Yule. In 1919 Greenwood joined the newly created Ministry of Health with responsibility for medical statistics. He co-authored a number of papers (see publications) with

Ethel Newbold Ethel May Newbold (28 August 1882 – 25 March 1933) was an English epidemiologist and statistician. She was the first woman awarded the Guy Medal in Silver in 1928. Early life Ethel May Newbold was born in Tunbridge Wells. One of eleven chi ...

during his tenure there (and wrote a touching obituary for her on her early death in 1933). In 1928 he became the first professor of

Epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and Risk factor (epidemiology), determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population, and application of this knowledge to prevent dise ...

and Vital Statistics at the

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public university, public research university in Bloomsbury, central London, and a constituent college, member institution of the University of London that specialises in public hea ...

where he stayed until he retired in 1945. He established a group of researchers, of whom the most important was

. Greenwood played the same role in A. B. Hill’s career as Hill’s father had played in his. The

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

awarded the

Buchanan Medal The Buchanan Medal is awarded by the Royal Society "in recognition of distinguished contribution to the medical sciences generally". The award was created in 1897 from a fund to the memory of London physician Sir George Buchanan (1831–1895). It ...

to Greenwood in 1927, and elected him a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

in 1928. The election certificate stated

Engaged in medical research. Has applied the statistical method to the elucidation of many problems of physiology, pathology, hygiene and epidemiology. Is the author, or joint author, of more than sixty papers dealing with these applications, including important contributions to the experimental study of epidemiology (Journ Hyg, 24, 1925, Greenwood and Topley; ibid, 25, 1926, Greenwood, Newbold, Topley and Wilson). Has done much to encourage and develop the use of modern statistical methods by medical laboratory investigators, and, as Chairman of the Medical Research Council's Statistical Committee, to secure the adequate planning and execution of field investigations.

He was elected

President of the Royal Statistical Society The president of the Royal Statistical Society is the head of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), elected biennially by the Fellows of the Society. The time-period between elections has varied in the past. The president oversees the running of t ...

in 1934 and awarded its

Guy Medal The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually. The Gold Medal was awarded every three years between 1987 and 2011, but is awarded bienni ...

in Gold in 1945. Greenwood produced a large body of research, was the first holder of important positions in modern

medical statistics Medical statistics (also health statistics) deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branc ...

and wrote extensively on the history of his subject, but as

wrote in his obituary, "in the future, it may well indeed seem that one of his greatest contributions, if not the greatest, lay merely in his outlook, in his statistical approach to medicine, then a new approach and one long regarded with suspicion. And he fought this fight continuously and honestly—for logic for accuracy, for ‘little sums.’" His name is attached to the Greenwood formula for the

variance In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expected value of the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The standard deviation (SD) is obtained as the square root of the variance. Variance is a measure of dispersion ...

standard error The standard error (SE) of a statistic (usually an estimator of a parameter, like the average or mean) is the standard deviation of its sampling distribution or an estimate of that standard deviation. In other words, it is the standard deviati ...

(SE) of the

Kaplan–Meier estimator The Kaplan–Meier estimator, also known as the product limit estimator, is a non-parametric statistic used to estimate the survival function from lifetime data. In medical research, it is often used to measure the fraction of patients living f ...

of survival. A statistical method invented by Major Greenwood in a statistical study of infectious diseases is still used in present-day research. The Greenwood statistic was used to discover that there is some kind of order in the placement of genes on the chromosomes of living things and this inspired a new look at epigenetics, which is now considered to be as important as genetics in how living organisms develop and evolve. Greenwood lived at

Loughton Loughton () is a suburban town and civil parish in the Epping Forest District of Essex. The town borders Waltham Abbey, Theydon Bois, Chigwell, Chingford, and Buckhurst Hill, and lies north-east of Charing Cross. For statistical purposes ...

, where among his neighbours were Sir Frank Baines,

Millais Culpin Millais Culpin FRCS (6 January 1874 in Ware, Hertfordshire – 14 September 1952 in St Albans, Hertfordshire) was an English physician and psychotherapist. He appears as a character in the '' Casualty 1907'' and ''Casualty 1909'' television ser ...

, and

Leonard Erskine Hill Sir Leonard Erskine Hill FRS (2 June 1866, in Bruce Castle, Tottenham – 30 March 1952, in Corton, Suffolk) was a British physiologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1900 and was knighted in 1930. One of his sons was t ...

Publications

* * * * \ * Edgar L. Collis and Major Greenwood
''The health of the industrial worker''.
1921 *''Cripps, L, Greenwood, M. and Newbold, E (1923). "A Biometric Study of the Inter-relations of `Vital Capacity' stature, stem length and weight in a Sample of Healthy Male Adults". Biometrika. 14: 3–4. doi:10.2307/2331816.

JSTOR JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...

2331816.'' *''Greenwood, M.; Newbold, E (1923). "On the Estimation of Metabolism from Determination of Carbon Dioxyde Production and on Estimation of External Work from Respiratory Metabolism". J. Hygiene. 21: 3–4. doi:10.1017/s0022172400031624. PMC 2167379 .'' *''Greenwood, M.; Newbold, E (1927). "Practical Applications of Statistics of Repeated Events, particularly to Industrial Accidents". J. Royal Stat. Society. 90: 487–547. doi:10.2307/2341203.

2341203.'' * Major Greenwood. ''The natural duration of cancer.'' London, England: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects, No. 33. 1926 * Major Greenwood. ''Epidemics and crowd-diseases: an introduction to the study of epidemiology''. 1935 * Major Greenwood. ''Medical statistics from Graunt to Farr: the Fitzpatrick lectures for the years 1941 and 1943''. 1948

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Greenwood, Major 1880 births 1949 deaths British epidemiologists English statisticians Fellows of the Royal Society Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood Alumni of University College London Alumni of the London Hospital Medical College Academics of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine People from Shoreditch Recipients of the Jenner Medal of the Royal Society of Medicine

Biography

Publications

References

Further reading

External links