The New Approach to Medicine

In the 19 twenties, biostatisticiansw started to argue that you can just do experiments. Once their idea was there, it was hard to challenge. It's often guided by relatively littlea theory. Instead of arguing about whether bad parenting causes mental illness, give people different forms of psychotherapy or medication and compare which one makes patients better. The goal in this first experiment was not to generate any new insights, but to simply understand how to run a field exper.