This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Jan P. Vandenbroucke, MD, PhD
Academisch Ziekenhuis Leiden University Hospital Leiden, the Netherlands

JAMA. 1988;259(10):1500.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The recent article by Drs Browner and Newman¹ about the civil rights of P values is a useful and imaginative description of an important thought process in medical scientific inference. It is to be hoped that the article will achieve a wide readership.

One aspect of the present publication is puzzling, however, to a person with an interest in the historical development of ideas in epidemiology and biostatistics. The puzzling aspect is the apparent need for the publication. Indeed, the essence of the argument was already known and was taught to physicians more than a half century ago. To substantiate this claim, we quote almost a full paragraph from the 1930s book entitled An Introduction to Medical Statistics by Woods and Russell,² which was intended as a textbook for physicians who took graduate courses at the London School of Hygiene as organized by Professor M. . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?