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June 1989 (Volume 67)
Quarterly Article
Albert G. Mulley, Jr.
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Based on my own experience in clinical research regarding health outcomes, I would like to make some personal observations that reinforce the potential power of Codman’s simple idea: that we can learn from the accumulation and orderly compilation of collective clinical experience. Then I would like to pose some questions about why the idea met with such stubborn resistance in Codman’s time—why he sometimes felt like a quixotic figure at best and, at worst, a failure. It may be that we can learn enough from history to avoid repeating mistakes as we rediscover and repackage “end results” as “outcomes research.”
Author(s): Albert G. Mulley, Jr.
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Volume 67, Issue 2 (pages 257–261) Published in 1989