Hilda Mary Woods

Hilda Mary Woods (1892–1971) MBE, was a British statistician who began work in 1916 at the Medical Research Council's Statistical Research Unit with Major Greenwood ("Major" being his forename, not a military rank). Subsequently, she would deputize for him in his Directorship of the Unit, where in 1931 Woods and her co-author William Russell published an early textbook on medical statistics (Introduction to Medical Statistics, reprinted in 1936 and 1948). Their practical text was based on lectures given at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), as referenced in Hill's 1937 Lancet articles and subsequent seminal text, The Principles of Medical Statistics.

Woods was appointed MBE for the statistical work she did in Ceylon where her newlywed husband died from septicaemia barely two months after their marriage. From Ceylon, Woods travelled to Africa, where, upon the death of her sister-in-law and later of her brother, she assumed the sole guardianship of her niece and adopted daughter, Rosemary Gear.

Woods was initially employed until the end of 1919 to work with Greenwood on ‘A report on the incidence of industrial accidents upon individuals with special reference to multiple accidents’, which was highly cited.

In February 1928, Greenwood and Woods transferred to the Division of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the LSHTM. Woods was appointed as Assistant Lecturer on the permanent staff of the University of London, the first female lecturer at the LSHTM. As well as giving lectures on epidemiology and vital statistics to medical postgraduates taking the Diploma in Public Health course, she had responsibility for the practical classes. Together with her statistician colleague, William Thomas Russell, Woods co-authored the first British textbook on medical statistics, Introduction to Medical Statistics, which was first published in 1931.

Later life

From 1946 until the early 1960s, Woods lived predominantly with her brother's family, after his migration to Kenya, New Zealand, Australia, and then-Rhodesia. After the death of his wife in childbirth, she became the de facto mother of her niece, Rosemary. She returned to England with Rosemary a few years after her brother died in 1958. In 1970, Rosemary moved to South Africa and Woods joined her. She died there after a series of strokes, a week after Rosemary married one of her former students. Publications Woods and Russell, An Introduction to Medical Statistics