The general practitioner as epidemiologist in Britain,1930–1960

Abstract

European and North American epidemiology changed in critical ways in the first half of the 20^th century, as experts increasingly turned to quantitative modelling and experimentation to answer key questions about virulence, endemicity, and immunity. As this article explores, however, British epidemiologists remained wedded to and advanced field-based epidemiological methods, developing these far beyond their origins in Victorian era outbreak investigation. Central to the advance of what I call community epidemiology was the work of William Pickles, who pushed epidemiological methods in data-gathering and visualisation through a long career as a rural general practitioner (GP). I demonstrate that in the period from 1930 to 1960, GPs created and adopted data-rich epidemiological ways of knowing that answered statisticians’ and modellers’ need for detailed spatial and temporal information, and that aimed to secure a place for GPs in the new system of national healthcare and research under the National Health Service (NHS) and the Medical Research Council.