Having last year published Up from Clinical Epidemiology & EBM and also Epidemiological Research: Terms and Concepts, Miettinen now this time with collaboration from his junior colleague I. Karp brings out this further introduction into epidemiological research; and he is now working on an introduction into clinical research, for publication next year. It evidently is Miettinen s felt time to crystallize the basic understandings he has come to as the culmination of a half-century of concentrated effort to advance the theory of epidemiological and meta-epidemiological clinical...

Scientific medicine in Miettinen's conception of it is very different from the two ideas about it that come to eminence in the 20^th century. To him, medicine is scientific to the extent that it has a rational theoretical framework and a knowledge-base from medical science. He delineates the nature of that theoretical framework and of the research to develop the requisite knowledge for application in such a framework. The knowledge ultimately needed is about diagnostic, etiognostic, and prognostic probabilities, and it necessarily is to be codified in the form of probability...