{"id":41672,"date":"2018-03-16T11:55:11","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T10:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=41672"},"modified":"2018-03-23T13:23:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T12:23:13","slug":"jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-criteria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/03\/16\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-criteria\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Criteria"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Henry Cohen (1900\u20131977)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1965 Sir Austin (\u201cTony\u201d) Bradford Hill<\/a><\/span>, professor emeritus of medical statistics in the University of London, gave a lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine\u2019s newly formed Section of Occupational Medicine, of which he was the president. Henry Cohen<\/a><\/span>, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead, was the president of the society itself at the time.<\/p>\n

In his lecture, titled \u201cThe Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?\u201d, Hill posed a problem: \u201cOur observations reveal an association between two variables, perfectly clear-cut and beyond what we would care to attribute to the play of chance. What aspects of that association should we especially consider before deciding that the most likely interpretation of it is causation?\u201d Hill wisely eschewed a philosophical discussion of the meaning of \u201ccausation\u201d, and instead described what he called \u201caspects of an association\u201d and \u201cnine different viewpoints\u201d that he suggested could help in analysing causation in such associations.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Austin Bradford Hill (1897\u20131991)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The published version<\/a><\/span>\u00a0of Hill\u2019s lecture has been cited over 7600 times, according to Google Scholar, including over 50 citations of the version<\/a><\/span>\u00a0that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine<\/span><\/em>\u00a0in 2015. His nine viewpoints have almost always been called \u201ccriteria\u201d, even though they are, all but one, not criteria at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last week<\/a><\/span>, I discussed the versatile IndoEuropean root (S)KER, with meanings such as cut, pluck, scratch, and separate. A metathetical variant, KREI, extends these meanings to ideas of distinguishing things from each other and sieving as a separating mechanism.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Greek the verb \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd means to separate, giving us the many adjectives that describe glands whose secretions separate in different ways:<\/span><\/p>\n