Eileen Brooke

Eileen Minnie Brooke (1905 – 1989) was a British statistician and health policy professional.

Education

Eileen Minnie Brooke attended East London College, earning a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1926, and an M.Sc. in mathematics in 1929. She completed doctoral studies in 1952.^[1]

In Great Britain, 1940s–1960s

In the 1940s, Brooke was based at the E. M. S. Statistical Branch in Norcross, and studied wartime health issues, including battle exhaustion,^[2] burns,^[3] and gastric ulcers.^[4] She was elected a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1943.^[5]

In the 1950s, Brooke was a statistician in the Medical Statistics branch of the General Register Office.^[6][7] She attended the Second World Congress of Psychiatry in Zürich in 1957, and presented a paper on schizophrenia.^[8] She also attended the International Congress on Mental Health in Paris in 1961.^[9]

Brooke was co-author of The survey of sickness, 1943 to 1952 (1957, with W. P. D. Logan),^[10] and author of A cohort study of patients first admitted to mental hospitals in 1954 and 1955 (1963)^[11][12] and A census of patients in psychiatric beds, 1963 (1967).^[13]

International work, 1960s–1970s

Brooke spoke at a mental health conference in Pennsylvania in 1964.^[14] She was chief of the Department of Medical Information and Statistics at the University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne.^[15][16] She was a collaborating investigator on the World Health Organization's International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia in the late 1960s.^[17][18] In 1977 she spoke at an WHO workshop on "the medico-social risks of alcohol consumption" in Luxembourg.^[16]

Brooke wrote and edited policy reports for the World Health Organization and other international bodies, including The methodology of psychiatric out-patient data collection (1973),^[19] The current and future use of registers in health information systems (1974),^[20][21] Suicide and attempted suicide (1974),^[22] and Activities in the field of drug dependence (European region) (1975).^[23]

Death

Brooke died in 1989. A colleague wrote in an obituary that "Miss Brooke was precious to WHO's programmes because she was a statistician who liked to assemble data, enjoyed handling them and had the ability to present them without ever losing sight of the broader context in which these data were gathered."^[24] Her papers are held in the Mile End Library, Queen Mary University of London.^[1]

Selected journal publications

• "Battle Exhaustion: Review of 500 Cases from Western Europe" British Medical Journal, 1946^[2]
• "Trends in the mental hospital population and their effect on future planning", The Lancet, 1961. (with G. C. Tooth)^[25]
• "More and More Barbiturates" Medicine, Science and the Law, 1964. (with M. M. Glatt)^[26]
• "Problems in determining the needs for mental health facilities in Britain" Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1964. (with John H. Mabry)^[27]
• "Some Aspects of Suicide in Psychiatric Patients in Southend" The British Journal of Psychiatry, 1968. (with A. A. Robin and Dorothy L. Freeman-Browne)
• "Judgments of trained observers on adverse drug reactions" Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 1979. (with Sylviane Blanc, Philippe Leuenberg, and Jean-Louis Schelling)^[28]
• "Drug-addiction in the canton of Vaud, 1974–8" Sozial- und Präventivmedizin, 1980. (with A. Delachaux and E. Haller)

References