Major Greenwood

Major Greenwood FRS (9 August 1880 – 5 October 1949) was a British epidemiologist and statistician.

Life and career Greenwood was born in Shoreditch in London's East End, the only child of Major Greenwood, a physician in general practice there ("Major" was his forename, not a military rank.) and his wife Annie, daughter of Peter Lodwick Burchell, F.R.C.S., M.B., L.S.A. The Greenwood family is recorded back to the twelfth century in the person of Wyomarus Greenwode, of Greenwode Leghe, near Heptonstall, Yorkshire, caterer to the Empress Maude in 1154. In 1928 he became the first professor of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he stayed until he retired in 1945. He appointed a group of researchers, of whom the most important was Austin Bradford Hill. Greenwood played the same role in Hill’s career as Hill’s father had played in his.

Greenwood lived at Loughton, where among his neighbours were Sir Frank Baines, Millais Culpin, and Leonard Erskine Hill.

Honors and awards The Royal Society awarded the Buchanan Medal to Greenwood in 1927, and elected him a Fellow in 1928. and awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1945.

Research Greenwood produced a large body of research, was the first holder of important positions in modern medical statistics and wrote extensively on the history of his subject, but as Austin Bradford Hill 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 or standard error (SE) of the Kaplan–Meier estimator 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.

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 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. JSTOR 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