We are used to all the jokes & rude comments about statistics & statisticians, but I thought it was some kind of editorial slip when I read that ‘The British Medical Journal helped lead the way … by including an independent statistician on every research HANGING committee’
But, what do you know, the term derives from an old British Medical Association custom, & has spread around the world – or at least the medical world. The Oxford English Dictionary however recognises only the original meaning of the phrase, as ‘the committee who decide the hanging of pictures in an Exhibition (e.g. that of the Royal Academy)’
THE PICTURE is of William Calcraft, to whom the Registrar-General must have been referring when he remarked in the 1861 Census Volume III General Report:
"The ancient office of executioner has one representative in England."
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