Austin Bradford Hill

This post is part of The Pump Handle's Public Health Classics series. By Sara Gorman Does cigarette smoking cause cancer? Does eating specific foods or working in certain locations cause diseases? Although we have determined beyond doubt that cigarette smoking causes cancer, questions of disease causality still challenge us because it is never a simple matter to distinguish mere association between two factors from an actual causal relationship between them. In an address to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill attempted to codify the criteria for determining…