ABSTRACT
The Russo–Williamson thesis was first proposed by Russo and Williamson. Russo and Williamson speak in one place of "statistics and probabilities" and in another of "dependencies". The author develops the thesis along the lines given earlier in his 2011 work. He confines himself to "statistical evidence" understood as referring to human populations when people are dealing with human diseases. Claude Bernard aims to turn medicine into a science by basing it on a scientific physiology. For Bernard, the key type of evidence in medicine was evidence of physiological mechanisms established by animal experiments. The Russo–Williamson thesis has been placed in a spectrum of views concerning the roles of statistical evidence and evidence of mechanism in medicine. This chapter considers the development of the thesis in the light of an example from the history of medicine, namely the investigations of influence of smoking on health. It focuses on this example by considering the question of smoking and lung cancer.
