Source of "better than 50/50 chance of being cured or improved"?

[Stephen Goranson]

Try (for "somewhere between 1910-1912 in this country, a random patient...had,
for the first time in the history of mankind, a better than fifty-fifty chance
of profiting from the encounter")
said to be quoted in Herman L. Blumgart in "Caring for the Patient,"
New England
J. of Medicine, v. 270 (1964) p. 449.

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson


Quoting "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>:

> Can anyone (Fred?) identify the source of this quotation?
>
> A correspondent asks
>
>> I am trying to identify the author and a quote attributed to
>> him.  It involves something about it being at the beginning of the
>> twentieth century (other time?) when for the first time a patient
>> could enter a hospital and then emerge with a better than 50/50
>> chance of being cured or improved.  I think the source might be
>> Lewis Thomas but I am not sure.  Can any of you stalwarts out there
>> help me with the exact quote and its source?
>
> It appears to be Harvard biochemist Lawrence J. Henderson, who put
> the year as 1912, and the exact quotation may be "... for the first
> time in human history, a random patient with a random disease
> consulting a doctor chosen at random stands a better than 50/50
> chance of benefitting from the encounter."  (Turned up with some Googling.)
>
> But I don't have the primary source, or its date.
>
> Joel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org