Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co The Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain had been fighting an ongoing battle against quack remedies, and had wanted specifically to get carbolic acid on the poisons register since 1882. Although without sympathy for the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company itself, Simpson casts doubt on whether "Carlill" was rightly decided. "The analytical problems arose in a particularly acute form in the smoke ball case. Thus it seemed very peculiar to say that there had been any sort of agreement between Mrs. Carlill and the company, which did not even know of her existence until January 20, when her husband wrote to them
Name-letter effect work has been called "seminal" by Stieger, Voracek, and Formann in their 2012 meta-analysis of 44 publications on the effect. Their meta-analysis found no trace of publication bias. In her 2014 meta-analysis of dozens of name-letter effect studies, Hoorens called the effect robust. She noted robustness in: Various explanations for the name-letter effect have been explored. Several explanations which seemed plausible at first have since been rejected. People may simply like most what they see most. Letters that appear more frequently in everyday usage also occur more often in people's names. Forer, in 1940, and Alluisi and Adams, in 1962,