title: [Clinical trials: principles of the method].
abstract: Comparative judgement, which is seminal to any kind of science performing measurements, has been applied to clinical reasoning for many centuries. The need for systematizing the observational methods used in medicine in order to draw more reliable inferences about the effects of therapies has been active all along the 19th century. This has resulted in controlled studies which yielded important advances in clinical and therapeutic knowledge, although their designs were not fully satisfactory. Clinical trials have gained their status of "hard science", methodology allowing causal inference, by the end of the 1940s after having adopted the statistical theories developed in the 1930s by Fisher for experimental design in agronomy. A long way has been run since the first controlled randomized trial. However, half a century later, modern clinical trial remains essentially a controlled randomized prospective study using methods to limit potential biases and to establish statistical significance.
authors.affiliation: INSERM SC10, Villejuif. jp.aboulker@vjf.inserm.fr
authors.forename: J P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Aboulker
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000266:history*; D004311:Double-Blind Method; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D011446:Prospective Studies; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D012107:Research Design
vernacular_title: Essai clinique: les racines de la méthode.