The origin of registry-based medical research and care.

During the last decades, registers comprising medical data have played an increasingly important role in medicine, both in health care and research. It is reasonable to expect that their importance will also increase in the future. Thus, a search for the origin of register-based medicine seems meaningful. Admittedly, collections of individual data on a number of patients may have occurred way back in history (Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen, 96, 1976:295). However, if we accept WHO's definition of a register, it implies more than a number of notifications. A register requires that a permanent record be established, that the cases be followed up and that basic statistical tabulations be prepared both on frequency and survival (Epidemiological Methods on the study of chronic diseases, Geneva, WHO Expert committee on Health Statistics, 1967). Thus, a register should aim at improving surveillance, health care and research. If we apply these criteria, we find the origin of register-based medicine in Norway in terms of the National Leprosy Registry, representing the world's first national patient register for any disease, established 1856 (Int J Epidemiol, 2, 1973: 81).

75th Anniversary of the Stiles-Crawford Effect(s): a celebratory special symposium, October 23, 2008; Rochester, New York.

There are rather few articles which, so-to-speak, serve to change the landscape in a scientific field. One of those was the discovery of the "directional sensitivity of the retina" by Walter Stanley Stiles and Brian Hewson Crawford (first reported in 1933). Subsequently, their findings were subdivided by Hansen into two logical components, "the Stiles-Crawford Effects of the First and Second Kinds, (SCE- 1 and SCE-2)." The former (SCE-1) dealt with aspects of their research which addressed alterations in perceived brightness of a visual stimulus; the second (SCE-2) was associated with the perceived hue and saturation of these visual stimuli. These discoveries arose out of a failed attempt by W.S. Stiles and B.H. Crawford to measure properly the areas of the entrance pupils of their experimental subjects as part of a research program which addressed problems of glare, e.g., disability glare, in illuminating engineering. Their research was conducted at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), which is located in Teddington, Middlesex, England. These two fine scientists properly deduced the reason for the failure of their experimental design, and they effectively described and defined a new feature of the visual system which was largely ascribed to the retina. In time, it was realized that this phenomenon was associated in large measure with the waveguide/fiber-optics properties of photoreceptors, and that this was a feature shared by virtually all vertebrate species. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, Enoch describes, as best he can, the culture and working conditions at NPL during 1959/60 when he served as a post-doctoral fellow with W.S. Stiles. And in the second part of this paper, the authors describe the findings of W.S. Stiles and B.H. Crawford at the time of their discovery. Today, we celebrate the 75th Anniversary of that research. The organizing committee for this program (alphabetically) is David Atchison, Jay M. Enoch, Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, and Pieter Walraven. Our group of speakers today will follow with discussions of aspects of subsequent work which has evolved from the initial discoveries made by the late W.S. Stiles and B.H. Crawford.