In 1931 the British Medical Journal published a paper by a 42-year-old pathologist describing eight women in Bombay. Four were treated with liver and four with Marmite. Nobody was randomized and there was no control group. By the standards a journal would apply today, it is an anecdote with a …
In May 1958, in a hospital laboratory in Paris that had not existed a year before, a 32-year-old pediatrician named Marthe Gautier looked at cells from a boy with Down syndrome and counted 47 chromosomes. Two years earlier, Tjio and Levan had shown that the normal human count was 46. Nobody had yet …