August 01, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Claude Bernard and Robert Koch
The hypothesis then needs to be tested and
if proven it can then be labeled as a scientific theory.
Until then “we have only groping and
empiricism.”
In his 1865 treatise on Experimental
Medicine he states that good theories are those that are backed up by most
facts and even then the theory can’t be supposed as final or absolute.
Theories must always be kept for revisions
as new facts keep pouring which is a bit odd coming from an experimental
physiologist rather than a physicist.
The other problem that he gave his
attention to was the cause; how does a scientist establish the cause of a
certain phenomenon.
He clarified it this way:
“Indeed, proof that a given condition always
precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty
that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon.
It must still be established that when this
condition is removed, the phenomenon will no longer appear…”
This is somewhat in harmony with the famous
four postulates that was proposed by Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler in 1884
nearly two decades after the publication of Experimental Medicine of Claude
Bernard.
These four postulates establish the
criteria for establishing a causative relationship between a microbe and a
disease though in modern times Koch’s postulates has become slightly obsolete
and has largely been replaced by the Bradford Hill criteria or Hill’s criteria
for causation.
Austin Bradford Hill of the Hill’s criteria
was an English epidemiologist and statistician whose primary interest was
public health and therefore it was central to his work to establish causal
relationship between presumed cause and an observed effect.
He was also a pioneer in the establishment
of randomization process in clinical trials and took part as a statistician in
the first ever randomized clinical trial conducted in modern medicine.
This first ever randomized trial goes by
the name of The Streptomycin Clinical Trials (Tuberculosis) Committee that was
initiated in 1946 just after the World War II when tuberculosis had become
endemic (Hill had himself contracted tuberculosis during the First World War)
and streptomycin had just been developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck at
Rutgers University in New Jersey in the United States.
Hill is also famous in the history of
medicine (although the word “fame” and “famous” is a relative one for very few
men of medicine would be aware of him) for establishing the causal relationship
between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
This study was published as a paper titled
“Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung” in the September 30, 1950 issue of the
British Medical Journal whose co-author was the British physician Sir Richard
Doll.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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