Janet Lane-Claypon

Dame Janet Lane-Claypon was an English physician, epidemiologist, and pioneer of cohort and case-control study methods whose 1912 and 1926 reports established research designs that became foundational to modern epidemiology. She was born Janet Elizabeth Lane-Claypon on February 3, 1877, at Boston, Lincolnshire, into a prosperous English country family. She earned a doctorate in physiology in 1905 and a medical degree in 1910 from the London School of Medicine for Women, becoming one of the first women in Britain to hold both a PhD-level science doctorate and a medical degree.

Her 1912 report Report on the Available Data on the Rate of Growth of Infants, published by the British Medical Research Committee, compared the weight gain of breast-fed and bottle-fed infants in Berlin and Boston, England, and is generally credited as the first published retrospective cohort study in epidemiology.

Her 1926 Ministry of Health report A Further Report on Cancer of the Breast compared 500 British women with breast cancer to 500 women without the disease, statistically analyzing reproductive history, lactation, and family history as risk factors. The study is generally regarded as the first modern case-control study in cancer epidemiology and anticipated by more than two decades the case-control designs Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill applied to lung cancer in the 1950s.

She served as Dean of the Household and Social Science Department at King's College of Household and Social Science, London, from 1916 to 1923 and was a founding member of the Medical Women's Federation. She married the senior Ministry of Health civil servant Sir Edward Forber in 1929, after which she retired from research at age 52 in keeping with the British Civil Service marriage bar then in force. She died in Sussex on July 17, 1967, at age 90.

Her name Janet is a Scottish diminutive of Jane, the English feminine form of John, ultimately from the Hebrew Yochanan meaning "Yahweh is gracious." Janet was a fashionable English and Scottish girls' name in the late nineteenth century when she was born.