Arthur Newsholme

Sir Arthur Newsholme (10 February 1857 – 17 May 1943) was a leading British public health expert during the Edwardian era in the early 20th century. He is best known for promoting successful local health programs in his role as the Medical Officer of the national Local Government Board for England and Wales. He took the lead in legislation for national health insurance. After he retired, he published influential studies of international health systems as well as statistical and epidemiological studies.

Personal life

He was born at Haworth and died at Worthing. He recalled talking with people who had known the Brontë family. He was educated in Haworth and Keighley; entered St Thomas' Hospital, London, 1875. He married Sara (nee Mansford) in 1881. They had no issue.

Career

Newsholme strongly advocated improvement of public health by state intervention, such as national health insurance, sanitary measures, hospitals, and sanatoriums for the isolation of persons with contagious disease. Some of these proposals for public health interventions were described in a seminal paper in 1919, with the following abstract:

"There is much illness that might have been avoided if there had been an organized system of state medicine," says Sir Arthur Newsholme, speaking of England. He would give a freer hand to the health officer who measures up to the standard. England's chief defect lies in the existence of small and inefficient local health bodies.

Newsholme lived through a time wherein England, and many other countries in the western world, saw a demographic transition characterized by an exponential growth of the population since halfway the nineteenth century, which he explained both by a rise in fertility and mortality since the early nineteenth century, followed by a decline of mortality since halfway the nineteenth century followed by a decline in fertility after 1875. In his 1911 book on The Declining Birth-Rate he ascertained: