Biography
Thomas McKeown re-read England's mortality registers alongside agricultural output and wage data to argue—controversially but influentially—that nutrition and sanitation, not therapeutics, drove the nineteenth-century mortality transition. The Modern Rise of Population (Edward Arnold, 1976) collected that evidence for a non-specialist audience and fuelled decades of debate in demography, economics and the history of public health. Earlier monographs on pulmonary tuberculosis and on the role of medicine in the nineteenth century had already framed what became known as the "McKeown thesis."
Published writings & editorial work
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Authored / principal writer
- The Modern Rise of Population
First published 1976 · Edward Arnold
Author
Thomas McKeown's landmark argument that the great nineteenth-century decline in mortality owed more to improvements in nutrition and living standards than to specific medical interventions. Widely taught and debated in public health, epidemiology and the history of medicine.