Concepts
Double-Blind
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A double-blind design is a controlled trial in which neither the participants nor the researchers administering the treatment know who is receiving the real treatment and who is receiving a comparison or placebo, so that neither group's expectations can influence the recorded outcome. It builds on single-blind design, where only the participant is kept unaware; the double-blind form is credited with catching bias that single-blinding alone missed, since a researcher who knows which patient is on the real drug can unconsciously read symptoms differently. The British Medical Research Council's 1943 patulin common cold trial is among the earliest large studies to use the term double-blind explicitly.
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Proposed ByNo single credited inventor; an early known example is Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven (1835 Nuremberg salt test) 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountWikipedia calls the 1835 Nuremberg salt test an early example of a double-blind protocol, not a formal proposal, and does not credit one inventor of the design; single-blind precedents go back further still. Proposed YearSourced to the subject's own accountThe year of the Medical Research Council's patulin trial, among the earliest large studies to use the term double-blind explicitly; single-blind precedents go back further and no one person is credited with inventing the double-blind design. Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Blinded Experiment (Wikipedia)
WikipediaHistory sectionQuote, History section
An early example of a double-blind protocol was the Nuremberg salt test of 1835 performed by Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven, Nurembergs highest-ranking public health official.
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