Fonds F008 - David Lawrence Sackett fonds

Dr. David Lawrence Sackett (1934-2015) was a physician, clinical scientist, and educator who is widely considered the father of evidence-based medicine.

Born and raised in suburban Chicago, Illinois, USA, Sackett earned a B.A. degree in 1956 from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and a B.Sc. in 1958 and an M.D. in 1960 from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago specializing in internal medicine and nephrology. He was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health before being drafted into the armed forces as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sackett was allocated to the U.S. Public Health Service and positioned at the Chronic Disease Research Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Here, his interest shifted from laboratory to clinical medicine, particularly clinical epidemiology. In 1967, he earned an M.Sc. degree in epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 1967, Sackett moved to Hamilton, Ontario to establish in McMaster University’s new School of Medicine the world’s first Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, in which he became an Associate Professor and of which he became the first Chair. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1970. In 1974 and 1975, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Community Medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, England, working with Dr. Walter W. Holland. At McMaster, Sackett conducted novel research into the effects of aspirin and carotid endarterectomy in reducing the chances of stroke; care and treatment options for those suffering from hypertension; and the effectiveness of nurse practitioners. He led the creation of an M.Sc. program in clinical epidemiology and health care research methods, and persuaded McMaster not to create a Department of Public Health so that the ideas of epidemiology would not be isolated in one department.

In 1983, in an effort to keep up-to-date clinically, Sackett undertook a two-year residency in hospitalist internal medicine. He subsequently served as Physician-in-Chief at Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals and then, beginning in 1990, as Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine for the Hamilton region and Attending Physician at Henderson General Hospital.

During his time in Hamilton, Sackett worked to develop the concept of evidence-based medicine, which posits that patient care should be based on a critical appraisal of the best and most up-to-date scientific evidence, clinical expertise, and patient values, as opposed to tradition, authority, and subjective judgement. It requires that randomized clinical trials (RCTs) be conducted to determine the efficacy of diagnostic tests and treatments and that the results of these trials be made accessible to and be trusted by physicians. For this reason, Sackett spent much time examining and improving the ways in which RCTs are carried out as well as actually carrying them out. Evidence-based medicine further requires that the results of each trial be compared with those of other trials concerning the same medical condition. In 1993, an international charitable organization, the Cochrane Collaboration, was formed to oversee the undertaking of this work by volunteer experts. Sackett became the first Chair of its Steering Group.

The following year, Sackett left McMaster and moved to England to become the founding Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and a clinician at John Radcliffe Hospital. While at Oxford, Sackett traveled extensively within the United Kingdom and Europe, visiting hospitals and teaching medical professionals about evidence-based medicine, which, as a result, gained great popularity. He also became the founding Co-Editor of the journal Evidence-Based Medicine. Wanting to make way for new thinking, Sackett gave his final lecture on evidence-based medicine in 1999.

That same year, Sackett officially retired from academia and clinical practice and returned to Canada. In Irish Lake, Ontario, he founded and became the Director of the Kilgore S. Trout Research & Education Centre (now based in Hamilton), where he read, researched, wrote, and taught about RCTs. Sackett also served as an expert witness in lawsuits against Big Pharma.

Dr. Sackett died in Markdale, Ontario on 13 May 2015 at the age of 80 due to cholangiocarcinoma (cancer of the bile duct).

Throughout his life, Sackett published twelve books, about sixty book chapters, and over four hundred articles in medical and scientific journals, and earned numerous prestigious awards and honours, including an Honorary Doctorate of Science from McMaster in 2009.