... Stewart, in her sixties, was easily brushed aside. She had been immersed in her research, scrambling around for funding, and she had raised two children (on her own); after her son’s death, she had helped care for his children — which left her little time to do the kind of networking that creates allies. Made unwelcome at Oxford, she accepted a position at Birmingham. But then came the question, what to do with the Oxford Survey, which by this time consisted of 23,000 manila envelopes. “Since my office in Birmingham was a trailer, a sort of hut, and the records were prodigious, it became a real problem.” She offered to leave the files at Oxford, feeling that the survey ought to continue: “We were building a database that would have allowed us to test several hypotheses about cancer. It ought to have been put on an ongoing basis. That’s what you have to do if you’re going to find the cause for cancer.” But Doll had no use for the files — even though he would, several years later, launch his own study of childhood cancer, with great fanfare and £6 million funding (some from the nuclear industry), announced in 1992 by the U.K. Co-ordinating Committee on Cancer Re-search, as a “new” and “unique nationwide investigation into the causes of cancer in children,” “the largest and most wide-ranging study” of its kind “to be carried out anywhere in the world.”

“It’s as though we’d never existed,” Stewart said, “though it was hard to see the difference between his study and ours. . . . It’s hard to describe, like a current I was swimming against. When the Medical Research Council put together a committee on epidemiology, Doll was made chairman, which gave him enormous influence. [He directed the MRC’s Statistical Research Unit from 1961 to1969.] After that, every department in the country was called in to consult — except us. We never got invited to official meetings, never got asked to give our point of view.” She was thus excluded from the processes, decisions, reviews, commentaries that shaped medical research in the United Kingdom, all the while she was developing an international reputation as an authority on radiation risk and receiving invitations to speak and consult from researchers throughout the world.

Omissions are difficult to document, but here’s one that leaps out. Doll, reminiscing (in “conversation” with Sarah Darby in 2003) about the early days of epidemiology, describes how he and several young men (all men) gathered around “those few senior people such as Professor Ryle at Oxford who were interested in developing the subject.” He makes no mention of Stewart, though she was one of those young scientists: in fact, she is the one Ryle chose, when he was made Regius Professor at Oxford in 1945, to help launch his program in Social Medicine — which set her on the path to epidemiology. Doll simply writes her out of the story.

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