William Richard Doll

Sir William Richard Doll, M.D. was an epidemiologist and eminent physician at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He was an early advocate of the theory that cigarette smoking is a principal cause of lung cancer. He published an early report on smoking and lung cancer.



= Biography =

In the September 1950 British Medical Journal, Dr. Richard Doll and Dr. A. Bradford Hill published preliminary report on smoking and lung cancer. They examined smoking rates for hospital patients with and without lung cancer. He did a 1954 prospective study of 40,000 physicians and concluded that heavy smokers were 24 times as likely to die of lung cancer (E, Whelan 1984). In September 1950, Dr. Doll and Dr. Hill reported in the British Medical Journal that between 1922 and 1947 the annual number of deaths from lung cancer had increased about fifteen times. Doll and Hill had examined the smoking rates of lung cancer patients admitted to twenty London hospitals and obtained data that closely resembled the Graham and Wynder study.(L. White, Merchants of Death, 1988).

Dr. Richard Doll was located at University of Oxford, CTSU, Harkness Building, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford OX2 6HE, UK. See Video Deposition of Sir Richard Doll, taken January 17, 1997, in West Palm Beach, Florida, and disclosures provided in connection therewith. (State of Florida's Proposed Plaintiff's Disclosure of Expert Witnesses, 2/5/97)

Sir Richard Doll died July 24th, 2005, at the age of 92.

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