The Modern Rise of Population

Thomas McKeown's 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.

The text re-reads the English mortality registers alongside agricultural output and wage data to set out what came to be known as the 'McKeown thesis'. Successive chapters examine the demographic record, the timing of decline in tuberculosis and the other major nineteenth-century killers, and the relative weight of specific medical interventions — vaccination, antimicrobial therapy, public sanitation — against the secular rise in nutritional standards.

Thomas McKeown was Professor of Social Medicine at the University of Birmingham from 1945 to 1977, and the volume distils a research programme he had been developing in earlier monographs on pulmonary tuberculosis and on the role of medicine in the nineteenth century. The Edward Arnold edition placed the work in the firm's social-medicine list, and the thesis became a standing reference point in demography, the economics of health and the history of public health.