“We in the West are the first generation in human history in which the mass of the population has to deliberately exercise to be healthy.” — so wrote Jeremiah “Jerry” Morris towards the end of his 99-year life of remarkable scholarship about the effects of disease and physical movement.
Or really, the lack of physical movement and how that causes disease — it was Jerry Morris who first carried out studies on the link between exercise and health. Born in 1910 to a family of poor Polish Jewish emigrants, Morris grew up in Scotland, where he was able to advance in his studies and become both a medical doctor and a public health expert. The negative effects that being poor as a child had upon his health (for instance, he had Rickets, a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency common in poor children, causing soft and warped bones) made a lasting impression on him.
Jerry Morris decided to study coronary heart disease, which had risen dramatically in Britain after the Second World War. Suspecting that a lack of exercise was a contributing factor, Morris put together in the 1950s a now-famous study of British bus conductors and drivers — the drivers he looked at had sat for most of the day, but the conductors spent their time running around the stations, going up and down stairs. He found that the drivers had coronary heart disease at least twice as much, and the paper that he published in 1958 in the _British Medical Journal _ , “Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work” was foundational for future scholarship.
Morris continued to publish well into his 90s, focusing on the importance of exercise and health. He also worked extensively on the ways that social class impacted disease, noting how much poorer people were likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than wealthier people. In fact, Morris was one of the folks who really opened up the study of epidemiology to a public health perspective, and the medical textbooks he published were used for decades as standard in their fields.
Jerry Morris and the Discovery That Exercise Is Good for You
Sources: “A tribute to Professor Jeremiah Morris: the man who invented the field of Physical Activity Epidemiology,” Steven N. Blair et al, _AEP_ vol 20, no 9, Sept 2010: 651-660. Image The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Archive, 1978 Jerry Morris.
