Death of David Sackett

I was sad to hear that David Sackett died recently at the age of 80. He was arguably the father of evidence based medicine and the first chair of the Cochrane Collaboration steering group in 1993. He was appointed the first Professor of the newly founded Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in 1994, having come from the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University Department, which he founded in 1967. David was a delightful person whom I got to know well during his time in Oxford and there was no question that he changed the whole approach to the evaluation of evidence in medicine in Oxford. Many young clinicians adopted his approach to this new field, which he had made his own, and Evidence Based Medicine has now become almost an industry.

His contributions to medicine were enormous and he will be missed by all, but certainly never forgotten.