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OBITUARIES For the full versions of articles in this section see bmj.com breaking textbook, Uses of Epidemiology (1957). Jeremy Morris He founded a masters course in social medicine to train the new breed of public health doctors that the Epidemiologist who showed the health benefits of exercise government had founded under his influence. One of the first students, Sir Iain Chalmers, said, “It was By comparing bus conductors with bus drivers and but said that if he must have one, he wanted special in a number of ways, but I’ll single out just postmen with sorting office staff the epidemiologist Morris. In the 1930s Morris investigated juvenile two. Firstly, our teachers encouraged us to challenge Jerry Morris showed that exercise prevented heart rheumatism, which mainly affected poor people. them to provide evidence for their assertions; that attacks. He also showed the relationship between After a year’s general practice in Nottingham was really liberating. Secondly, the teaching was deprivation and infant mortality. In old age he did he became assistant medical shared between the London equally careful research to determine the income officer for Hendon and Harrow, School of Hygiene and the that elderly people need to remain healthy. He and two years later, in 1941, London School of Economics, was awarded a CBE, though not the knighthood joined the army. He was the first which meant that a bunch of that many colleagues thought he deserved. He person to use penicillin in India medically qualified misfits were was a spectacular practitioner of his own research in a hospital that he established exposed to Brian Abel-Smith, findings, walking, running, or swimming until his in the Assam swamps; there, John Westergaard, Hilary Rose, death from pneumonia aged 99. sceptically, he injected it “in David Piachaurd, and others.” He had ebullience, prodigious energy, moral anger” into a soldier with no Morris served on dozens principles, few vices, wit, and a talent for friendship. chance of survival. The soldier of committees on health, He devised innovative methods, said his colleague recovered. In Burma he studied health education, inequalities, Eve Alberman: “Together with colleagues he devised and treated Burmese soldiers nutrition, sports, social I think the first validated measures of diet and emerging from the jungle with medicine, cardiology, and exercise derived from respondents’ histories. His infections and infestations. penal reform. He lectured sampling techniques were brilliant and economical He returned to civilian life He showed the link between internationally. He received of resources. He had the highest possible standards in 1946 with a Rockefeller exercise and health with his many awards; the one that gave of excellence in research and ensured that all his fellowship in preventive work on bus crews, measuring him most pleasure was the department’s studies reached them.” medicine at the Medical the times bus conductors went Olympic gold medal and prize Research Council in Mill Hill, up and down stairs for exercise science in 1966. Social equality London, and in 1948, the He read a daily paper, He also had a lifelong commitment to social year the NHS began, became director of the social three weekly news magazines, and two literary equality. He joined the Labour Party at 16, having medicine unit. Sir Harold Himsworth, head of the periodicals, and he went to concerts, theatre, and been refused because of his age four years earlier, MRC, recognised his ability and gave him a free opera, would interrogate his friends about them, and left to join the Green Party when the then prime hand. In 1949 he showed the link between exercise and upbraid them for not keeping up. minister Tony Blair took Britain into the Iraq war. and health with his work on bus crews, methodically Short and spare, he never lost his Scottish accent. Morris had a threadbare childhood in Glasgow measuring the number of times bus conductors went He was, said Stephen Lock, a former editor of the shortly after his Polish father and Russian mother up and down stairs and showing that drivers and BMJ, “very tolerant and full of discreet scandal about had docked in Liverpool; both were refugees from conductors were of the same background and status. the great and the good.” He gave up cigarettes in the pogroms. His father was a Jewish religious 1956 after a struggle, and for while “smoked” an teacher, and they lived in two rooms of a Gorbals Health policy unlit pipe with a plug of paper in the bowl. tenement. He recalled hearing the screams from In the 1940s he teamed up with the social scientist He married Galina Schuchalter in 1939. He lived the next street on Saturday nights when wives and welfare state pioneer Richard Titmuss, author alone after he was widowed and, characteristically, were beaten by drunken husbands. His father took of Poverty and Population, published in 1938. looked after himself until he collapsed with the him and his brothers for a weekly four mile walk, They worked together in a friendship that lasted pneumonia from which he died. His mind remained rewarding them with an ice cream (a rare treat in until Titmuss’s death in 1973 and, with Brian Abel razor sharp and his wit undiminished until his those days); or a choc ice if they finished within an Smith, helped form health policy under the Labour death, interrogating visitors to his hospital bed hour. Years later he challenged his father: why four governments of the 1960s. their opinions of the postal strike and the British miles, and why an hour? He stayed at the MRC for nearly 30 years, retiring National Party. He won a scholarship to Hutcheson’s Grammar at 65. For eight of these years, 1959-67, he was also Caroline Richmond School and Glasgow University, followed by a professor of social medicine at the London Hospital, Jeremy Noah Morris, epidemiologist (b 1910; q 1934, place at University College Hospital medical and found time to be a magistrate in Middlesex University College Hospital, London), died from school, at which point his family moved to London. in 1956-66. From 1975 he had a tiny office at the pneumonia 28 October 2009. After qualifying he spent three years as a hospital London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, From the Archive: “Exercise, health, and medicine,” resident, working under the great cardiologist Sir where he worked until shortly before his death. BMJ 1983;286:1597-8. Thomas Lewis; Lewis hadn’t wanted a student, He produced many research papers and a ground Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4679 1146 BMJ | 14 NOVEmbER 2009 | VOLUME 339 .