The advent of fair treatment allocation schedules in clinical trials during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

Who cites it

12 citing papers in PubMed.

1. Malaria therapy for neurosyphilis at Mont Park Hospital for the insane in Australia, 1927-1928.History of psychiatry · 2026
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2. The problematic history of randomised controlled trials Part 1: presumption and confusion on the road to randomisation.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2026
   Article
3. Registry or randomization - must it be evidence or could it be coincidence?Innovative surgical sciences · 2025
   Review
4. Science of science: A multidisciplinary field studying science.Heliyon · 2024
   Article
5. Homo methodologicus and the origin of science and civilisation.Heliyon · 2023
   Article
6. The 'personal equation' as observer bias, and proposed methods to contain it in Anglo-American medicine.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2021
   Article
7. Richard Cabot, pair-matched random allocation, and the attempt to compare like with like in the social sciences and medicine. Part 2: the context of medicine and public health.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2021
   Article
8. Pioneering controlled trials of treatments for erysipelas and pneumonia in Glasgow, 1936-1947.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2019
   Article
9. Did John Stuart Mill influence the design of controlled clinical trials?Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2019
   Article
10. Alternation as a form of allocation for quality improvement studies in primary healthcare settings: the on-off study design.Trials · 2015
    Article
11. Tackling treatment uncertainties together: the evolution of the James Lind Initiative, 2003-2013.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2013
    Article
12. UK Medical Research Council and multicentre clinical trials: from a damning report to international recognition.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2013
    Article

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

Abstract

PubMed holds no abstract for this paper.

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