Image: photo of Maurice King and Colin Butler, London, probably early 1997 (photographer uncertain). Photographer: Colin Butler
Update (January 31, 2025).
Maurice's obituary was published in the BMJ (formerly called the British Medical Journal) in November 2024. It is behind a paywall but can be partly read at www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2603
Below was written in late 2024. I am very sorry to advise that Maurice passed away in August, 2024. He was BODHI's public health adviser from 1991 until his passing. The second edition of our co-edited book "Climate Change and Global Health, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Effects" is dedicated to Maurice (as well as Tony McMichael and Will Steffen). An obituary has been published at the University of Leeds - see https://secretariat.leeds.ac.uk/home/obituaries/maurice-king/ On October 12, 2024 I wrote a 4 page tribute about Maurice, which I also sent to the editor of the BMJ, in the hope that journal will commission an obituary.
Its highlights are:
1. Discussion of the BMJ's themed issue (1999), suggested by Maurice, to mark “six billion day”. This issue was guest edited by the late Prof. Tony McMichael. 2. Maurice's honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. 3. Discussion of the "Hardian taboo", Maurice's attempts to lift this, and its ongoing consequences. 4. Conclusion: Maurice, whom I first met in 1990, had enormous insight into the unfolding time of peril in which we now live. In his 1990 article in The Lancet he called for “An ecological view of the world (to be) shared by as many of the world’s people as possible.” Had his views been better heeded we would all now be much better off.
I wish to offer my condolences, on behalf of all of BODHI's members and supporters, to Maurice's wife, Dr Felicity Savage-King and to his extended family. Colin
Dr Maurice King (1991-2024) (public health adviser) (written by Colin Butler, December 29, 2017 and January 6, 2018, amended 12 October, 2024)
I first heard of Maurice's name in 1983, while preparing to go to Africa for 3 months, as a medical student, in 1985. My future supervisor there, Dr Philip Andrew, recommended that I read Maurice's edited book "Medical Care in Developing Countries", which I did. I found it second hand in a bookshop on Hunter St, Newcastle. It had a lot about poverty as well as much practical advice for providing health care in low-income settings.
In 1990, while studying at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, for the Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Maurice gave a guest lecture to our class, on public health (hygiene is an old world for public health). On the same evening I collared him in the basement lounge at the School, where we talked for three hours. Maurice saw high population growth rates in Africa as a dominant underlying reason for its under-development and poverty. He also perceived climate change as a major future risk.
Later that year I visited Maurice and Felicity in Leeds, where we discussed the draft of his article "Health is a sustainable state", soon after published in the Lancet. In 1992, Susan and I visited him, again in Leeds, just before Christmas. I remember a frozen landscape from the train, and warm hospitality inside their terrace house.
Maurice's 1990 paper was initially well-received (according to Google Scholar, cited 250 times, as of Oct. 2024, 297 times). But it was then savagely attacked. In 1994 I published my first article in the Lancet (actually my first full-length article in any medical journal) called "Overpopulation, overconsumption and economics" (The Lancet 343: 582-584). You can read it here, if you want: in it, I defended King.
I wrote, in part:
"Verkuyl did not claim that contraception alone will solve Third World problems, any more than King proposed the denial of medical care to children in developing countries as a means of avoiding closure of the demographic trap."
I also wrote:
The Church’s provision of medical care in the developing world is a praiseworthy activity, but do Verkuyl’s critics such as Peeters and Kelly really believe that the Third World population can reach, say, 10 billion, and that sufficient global resources will be available to cater for the “wants of all”, including continuing Northern demand? Surely we have to accept that there is a limit to the earth’s resources and that global population must be kept below that limit. Is this goal achievable without either universal access to birth control or closure of the demographic trap?
Naturally, it is possible to find papers with completely different views, written, I submit, either by people who have not thought about the topic sufficiently, or who have not read enough, or have some ideological bias which stops them from listening and thinking clearly.
Below is from Kamran Abbasi's article in the BMJ, published in 1999. This described Maurice as "a visionary or a madman". For me, Maurice is definitely a visionary. I would add to this article by mentioning Maurice's immense contribution to the provision of medical education in low-income settings, building on his first book, with titles such as Primary Child Care and Primary Mother Care (see review by Tony McMichael, here).
"Born in 1927 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), King studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then St Thomas's Hospital, London. Initially, he worked as a pathologist, moving to Africa in 1956. While in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he displayed his willingness to fight injustice. He objected to not being allowed to train black Africans; his employers did not renew his contract, and he left.
In 1962, he started at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, and, as he puts it, “jumped out of the Petri dish into the community.” David Bradley, professor of tropical hygiene at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a colleague in Uganda (who I have also met several times) recalls: “He volunteered to look after a remote mission hospital while the doctor took a fortnight’s holiday, and he was struck by the absence of literature to prepare him for it. So he organised a conference, took all the papers from it, and began to integrate them into a coherent whole. After 18 months of meticulously detailed work combined with profound intuitive leaps, there resulted Medical Care in Developing Countries, the bible of the primary health care movement.” The book has sold over 50,000 copies.
King formed many of his ideas on demography in those early days in Africa (“they were apt to come as I was going round a particular roundabout on my way home on my scooter”), though they had yet to develop into one cohesive vision. By 1985 he was teaching public health medicine at Leeds University, having spent most of his time in Africa working on various projects for the World Health Organisation, and was focusing his intellectual energies on primary health care. His other great cause at the time was nuclear disarmament, which he espoused with his usual passion.