STEPS TO HEALTH

See Also: BUSES; CITRIC PERCH DROPPING; MEDICAL RESEARCH Medical Research Council, Social Medicine Unit

In the years that followed the Second World War Britons began to die of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. The Medical Research Council s'Social Medicine Unit s'Director 'Jerry' Morris set up a study to investigate the level of coronary seizure rates in different occupations.

In 1949 Dr Morris noticed that his data had revealed that age-for-age bus drivers had markedly higher rates of heart attacks than did the vehicles conductors. The former were sedentary, whereas the latter climbed at least 500 steps every working day. This was the first clear evidence of there being a connection between being physically active and reducing the likelihood of suffering a cardiac arrest. Morris s'study had involved thousands of men. However, he was wary of treating the link as being proof. His initial findings were corroborated by data for postal workers. This showed how sedentary ones, such as counter clerks, had demonstrably more heart attacks than did the postmen who spent their working days delivering letters and parcels.

Morris s paper Coronary Heart-Disease and Physical Activity of Work was published in The Lancet in 1953. The idea that health and exercise might be connected to one another can be traced back in the history of medicine to Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 B.C.), however, it was this article that provided the first scientific evidence of the correlation between them. In the United Kingdom its findings were met with widespread disbelief. The newspapers poured derision upon his conclusion and the large majority of cardiologists chose to ignore his work. However, the value of the findings was appreciated in the United States and with time the paper was given its due in Britain.

For a subsequent study, London Transport supplied the researcher with information about the different sizes of trousers that were worn by its bus drivers and conductors. This data revealed that the latter tended to be thinner than the former. However, he was able to establish that body shape was not the factor that determined the level of risk but rather it was the degree of vigorous physical exercise that a person undertook.

Location: The Central Middlesex Hospital, Acton Lane, Park Royal, NW10 7NS.

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, WC1E 7HT. The Unit migrated from the Central Middlesex Hospital to the London Hospital in 1956. Eleven years later it settled at the School. Formally, Dr Morris retired in 1978. However, he continued to work until a few weeks before his death in 2009. (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.lshtm.ac.uk

David Backhouse 2024