Background
Philip D."Arcy Hart was the grandson of Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling.
Philip D."Arcy Hart was the grandson of Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling.
Clifton College.
Hart became a consultant physician at University College Hospital at the age of 34. Three years later, he joined the Medical Research Council (Medical Research Council). He was a pioneer of evidence-based medicine, conducting some of the earliest randomized controlled trials on patulin in 1943 and streptomycin with Austin Bradford Hill.
Hart became involved with much of the Medical Research Council"s early research into dust diseases in coal miners.
At the age of 71, Hart published a seminal paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, showing that the intracellular pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis avoids destruction in the cell"s lysosomes by circumventing these organelles altogether—a trick now known to be used by many other intracellular pathogens.
He was a member of the Committee for the Study of Social Medicine set up in 1939, and later the Sigerist Society, which discussed the theoretical and social aspects of medicine from a Marxist point of view.
He was a member of the Medical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee, which is generally accepted as the first randomized clinical trial.