1 Department of Pediatrics, Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, M. S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania
Among the meager (medical) benefits of World War II were the Kirschner wire (for internal fixation of fractures), the creation of university-based surgical teams, the forced development of pulmonary physiology (to combat the force of gravity in dive-bombers), and the movement of statistically based experimental designs from Great Britain's agriculture to its war production lines, there to minimize through sequential analysis and similar techniques the Empire's investment of men and metal in defective shell casings. Subsequent to the cessation of hostilities, several of these statistical techniques began to be used in the art of clinical medicine and place it more firmly on the permanent pilings of the scientific method than had previously been the case.