David was a remarkable, modest person and wonderful as a friend. His scientific achievements in mathematics and statistics are numerous and are well recorded at the James Lind Library, but he was also a traveller, a raconteur, kind, and yet determined. He had a profound interest in people and their welfare and happiness, certainly not as an amorphous statistical group. He was the originator of the concept of pharmacovigilance. His pivotal 1965 paper about his original far-reaching thoughts after the thalidomide tragedy was entitled “The design and logic of a monitor of drug use”. There, he wrote: “The aim must be to create conditions under which hitherto unsuspected associations between a drug and a reaction in a patient are recognized as early as possible. To this end, emphasis should be placed on the recording of events, untoward happenings to patients, rather than on adverse reactions. […] Even the simplest type of recording, in which events are recorded but very few attendant circumstances, could have drawn attention to the rapid increase of phocomelia in West Germany […]. A system of control charts could be used to follow trends. If recording is more full, great opportunities arise for […] early detection of important associations.”
So David Finney was the first to see the potential of patient monitoring for adverse events. Note that he was mainly concerned with what the patients experienced as an outcome of their treatment, rather than just considering the effects of the drugs. David Finney’s brainchild has become a reality through the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring and Uppsala Monitoring Centre. Moreover, at least a vision of his ideas is held in almost every nation in the world: to consider the outcomes of the treatments we use in medicine, and to find out whether medicines work well in real-life medical practice in very different contexts. Whilst David noted that a systematic approach was necessary and that it would be costly overall, he also pointed out the potential long-term savings.
The whole world, therefore, has benefitted greatly from this one person. More of his relevant thoughts in the broad area of patient outcomes and individual patient monitoring are collected in the UMC book “Writings on Pharmacovigilance”. The depth of David’s concern about science as well as people was expressed in his writings about the misuses and misunderstandings of statistics. One of his papers on statistics was entitled “A necessity for living or a source of nonsense”. Nor was David short on delightfully quiet and ironic humour. In his paper “Support and illumination” he commences with a joke: “Too many people use statistics as a drunken man uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination!”, and then he proceeds to discuss the confusions in terminology in the jargon terms of statistics and the same words in common English use, such as ‘chance’, risk’, ‘probability’ and ‘not significant’.
I have enjoyed several opportunities to chat with David over the years and to see him in action too, but one of the most poignant was at an International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology meeting in Edinburgh, where he was the first Professor of Statistical Sciences. He was sitting alone in a corridor where conference delegates were hurrying to their coffee between sessions: nobody talked to, or even recognised him. He simply sat still and gazed out of the window, apparently deep in thought. When I spoke, he said, “Oh hallo” as though I saw him every day. I asked him if he had been in the meeting, and he said he thought he might not understand it. It didn’t take much to persuade him to sit in on a session, nor did it take long before he corrected a presenter who reported a 119% increase in x, pointing out gently but firmly that “per cent means ‘out of a hundred’.”
I shall not forget David, and I am also pleased that we had him with us for more than 100 years. His family must be very proud of him and we hope that the knowledge of his importance to so many might offer a little comfort to them.
On 18 November 2009, Professor David J Finney was interviewed by Jan P Vandenbroucke on behalf of the UK’s Royal Statistical Society, of which he was past president, and for the James Lind Library. There you can find more about this great man’s life.