2.5. Terminology and Further Reading#
Terminology in this chapter
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observational study
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treatment
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outcome
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association
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causal association
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causality
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comparison
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treatment group
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control group
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epidemiology
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confounding
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randomization
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randomized controlled experiment
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randomized controlled trial (RCT)
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blind
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placebo
Fun facts
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John Snow is sometimes called the father of epidemiology, but he was an
anesthesiologist by profession. One of his patients was Queen Victoria, who
was an early recipient of anesthetics during childbirth. -
Florence Nightingale, the originator of modern nursing practices and famous
for her work in the Crimean War, was a die-hard miasmatist. She had no time
for theories about contagion and germs, and was not one for mincing her
words. “There is no end to the absurdities connected with this doctrine,” she
said. “Suffice it to say that in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no
proof such as would be admitted in any scientific enquiry that there is any
such thing as contagion.” -
A later RCT established that the conditions on which PROGRESA insisted—children
going to school, preventive health care—were not necessary to
achieve increased enrollment. Just the financial boost of the welfare
payments was sufficient.
Good reads
The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of
Cholera by Sandra Hempel,
published by our own University of California Press, reads like a whodunit. It
was one of the main sources for this section’s account of John Snow and his
work. A word of warning: some of the contents of the book are stomach-churning.
Poor Economics, the best seller by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT, is an accessible and lively account of ways to
fight global poverty. It includes numerous examples of RCTs, including the
PROGRESA example in this chapter. In 2019, Banerjee, Duflo, and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Prize in Economics, in part for showing that “questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments.”
