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Abstract
Wolf's work was always controversial, and many were sceptical of his conclusions. Some of his earliest work was on a patient with an oesophageal fistula. He observed the effects of stress on gastric acid production, but "When he made his presentation to the Gastroenterological Society they laughed at him because they said it was one case", said longtime colleague John Bruhn. "How could he make generalisations?" When it came to the Roseto studies, "Ancel Keys was probably our biggest adversary", Bruhn said. Keys wrote several articles severely criticising the Roseto studies, suggesting that there may have been a healthy migrant effect at work. Epidemiologists were critical because [Roseto]'s population of only 1600 made it difficult to construct time-phase studies. So despite "good advice from biostatisticians and doing everything according to scientific method, we had constant difficulties in getting our work published", Bruhn said. "The initial studies in JAMA and the Journal of Chronic Disease were published without any problem since they were novel and new, and we had thousands of reprint requests from all over the world."