Live long and prosper: a mass strategy for treating the factors associated with ischaemic heart disease and stroke.(Editorial)

In the 1950s and 1960s a debate raged between Professor (later Sir) George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and Professor Robert (later Lord) Platt, Professor of Medicine in Manchester. (1) Pickering maintained that people with a high blood pressure were in the tail of a skewed normal distribution of blood pressures in the general population. Platt maintained that those with a high blood pressure formed a distinct distribution. Pickering is generally held to have won the debate. Platt accepted that blood pressure was multifactorial, while Pickering for his part conceded that there might be discrete subgroups of patients hidden in the unimodal ...