Austin Bradford Hill, Epidemiologist

LONDON - Sir Austin Bradford Hill, a pioneering epidemiologist who led one of the first research teams to establish a link between smoking and cancer, has died at age 93, his son said yesterday.

Dr. Hill died Thursday at his home near Windermere in the Lake District of northwestern England, according to his son, Dr. David Hill. He did not disclose the cause of death.

The elder Dr. Hill was head of the Statistical Research Unit of the Medical Research Council when his team published its study in 1952. Dr. Hill gave up pipe smoking two years later, according to the Press Association, the domestic news agency.

"There was not much reaction to the link initially, probably because of the revenue from cigarettes and tobacco advertising," said the younger Hill. "He would probably most like to be remembered for his work in getting the medical profession to realize the importance of scientific testing."

Dr. Hill was one of the impressive early figures in epidemiology, according to Dr. Clark Heath, vice president for epidemiology and statistics at the American Cancer Society.

"For the American Cancer Society and myself, I remember him for the papers he published that provided the earliest strenuous test of the ideas that smoking caused cancer," Heath said in a telephone interview from Atlanta.

"He was a great teacher and laid the basis for our thinking about epidemiological diseases and our work," Heath said.

Lawrence Garfinkel, recently retired as vice president for epidemiology and statistics at the American Cancer Society, said Dr. Hill's study "had a great deal of significance in swaying the scientific community to believe that cigarette smoking was related to lung cancer and a number of other diseases."

Follow-up studies continued for several years, and the data have been an important resource for other research, Garfinkel said in a telephone interview from New York City.

"I don't know that you can say they were the first to point out a link," Garfinkel said. "They were certainly one of the earliest."

Dr. Hill's "Principles of Medical Statistics," published in 1937, has gone through 11 editions, the last in 1985 under the title "A Short Textbook of Medical Statistics."

He was knighted in 1961, and was emeritus professor of medical statistics of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the University of London.

He is survived by two sons and a daughter. Funeral arrangements were not announced.