MAHOMED,FREDERICK,AKBAR (1849-1884) - PIONEER OF CLINICAL RESEARCH

Professional historians generally treat the phrase 'what if' with pard onable scorn, It is a speculation which necessarily will never be test ed in the real world, Nevertheless, there is a reasonable likelihood t hat, if typhoid fever had not carried off Frederick Akbar Mahomed at t he age of 35, clinical research in Britain would have been both strong er and more highly developed at the beginning of the 20th century, Ind eed, if he had lived to continue his most ambitious project, we would have had access to a unique source of clinical and epidemiological dat a 70 years before anything similar was contemplated.