Frederick Akbar Mahomed (1849-1884): pioneer of clinical research.

Professional historians generally treat the phrase 'what if' with pardonable scorn. It is a speculation which necessarily will never be tested in the real world. Nevertheless, there is a reasonable likelihood that, if typhoid fever had not carried off Frederick Akbar Mahomed at the age of 35, clinical research in Britain would have been both stronger and more highly developed at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, if he had lived to continue his most ambitious project, we would have had access to a unique source of clinical and epidemiological data 70 years before anything similar was contemplated.