Commentary: N.H. Choksy and serum therapy

The advent of fair treatment allocation schedules in clinical trials during the 19th and early 20th centuries

“…Those done in India by Waldemar Haffkine and Nasserwanji Hormusji Choksy at the turn of the century on vaccines and treatments for plague and cholera are early examples of separate studies done within a series of planned controlled trials. 43–46 In the USA (and in New York and Boston in particular), Jesse Bullowa, William Park, Russell Cecil, Max Finland and others were responsible for a remarkable series of trials testing serum treatment for pneumonia during the third and fourth decades of the 20th century. 47 The only example of anything comparable in Britain appears to have been a cluster of trials done by Thomas Anderson and his colleagues at Ruchill Hospital in Glasgow in the late 1930s, to assess the effects of sulphonamides in a variety of infections.…”