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The caustic jibe about using statistics like drunkards use lamp posts—for support rather than for illumination—might have been aimed at doctors. Fortunately, perhaps, statisticians are hard to discourage, and they continue to write what they imagine are straightforward accounts of their subject for the less numerate. Mould's Introductory Medical Statistics (Institute of Physics Publishing, $27, ISBN 075035134) is more ambitious than most. It includes, for example, a chapter on the Cox proportional …