Sir George Newman GBE, KCB (23 October 1870, Leominster, Herefordshire - 26 May 1948) was an English public health physician, Quaker, the first Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health in England, and wrote a seminal treatise on the social problems causing infant mortality.
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George Newman was educated at Sidcot School in North Somerset (1881–1885) and then at the Quaker Bootham School in York (1885–1887). He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then King's College London before gaining his MD (winning the gold medal) and then becoming a demonstrator in bacteriology and lecturer in infectious diseases at King's.[1] In 1900 he became Medical Officer to the Borough of Finsbury in inner London and rural county of Bedfordshire in England. His experiences in these posts led him to publish Infant Mortality: a Social Problem in 1906. This has remained a medical classic, pointing out the unchanged infant mortality rate over the preceding 50 years, and identifying the causes and areas potentially open to intervention. In 1907 he became the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Education, and in 1919 he also was appointed as Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health. The annual reports he wrote for both these posts were widely acclaimed as important and influential[2]
George Newman was the son of Henry Stanley Newman and Mary Ann Pumphrey. His father was a Quaker who undertook several missionary journeys, including one to India, and edited The Friend, a Quaker journal.
He was the fourth of six children, and initially planned to become a missionary, but later decided to study medicine starting in Edinburgh and then at King's College London. After qualifying he undertook postgraduate studies; he studied for his MD at Edinburgh, receiving the gold medal for his year, before winning a scholarship to study public health and gaining his Diploma in Public Health in 1895. In August 1898,he married Adelaide Constance Thorp, who was an artist; they had no children. They lived at Harrow Weald after he retired in 1935. On 26 May 1948 he died at The Retreat, York.
Sir Robert Morant was the Permanent Secretary to the UK Government's Board of Education when, in 1907, he appointed Newman as Chief Medical Officer to the Board. In 1923 Newman was invited to give an address to the centenary celebrations of his old school, Bootham, in York. He referred to Alcuin, an eighth century educator and deacon whose three guiding principles were: holy living and holy learning; teaching understanding rather than repetition; and, finally, that education should be 'wisely and liberally furnished'.[3] Newman believed that Quaker schools, such as Bootham, embodied these principles. He maintained an interest in medical education, and in 1923 he wrote Recent Advances in Medical Education.
His initial contribution, Infant Mortality: a Social Problem, was the forerunner of many writings about public health which proved respected and influential, including: Hygiene and Public Health in 1917, Outline of the Practice of Preventative Medicine in 1919, The Rise of Preventative Medicine in 1932, and The Building of the Nation’s Health in 1939. His annual reports as the Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health were eagerly awaited each year, and were widely regarded as authoritative monographs on a variety of aspects of this field.
He was born into a Quaker family and remained a committed Christian throughout his life. From 1899, he was the (anonymous) editor of the Friends' Quarterly Examiner, a Quaker journal, for some forty years. In autumn 1914 he became involved in the establishment of the Friends' Ambulance Unit, which provided medical care for soldiers and civilians in the war zone, and following the introduction of conscription in 1916 he helped to negotiate exemptions for Quakers serving with the ambulance unit.