Heart Attacks: Another one Rides the Bus

Liam Hudson, the British psychologist, argued that the real augury of success in science was not brilliance so much as it was a certain habits of mind: a patient and enduring curiosity about the subject, coupled with a knack for picking good projects (I think his showcase example was Ernest Rutherford, but don't hold me to it).

Anyway, I thought of Hudson last week when I read about the death of this guy:

Jeremy N. Morris, a British epidemiologist whose comparison of heart-attack rates among double-decker bus drivers and conductors in London in the late 1940s and early ’50s laid the scientific groundwork for the modern aerobics movement, died Oct. 28 in Hampstead, London. He was 99 ½. ...

It had long been surmised that exercise and a healthy heart were correlated. ...

Dr. Morris surmised that the proof could be found on the stairs of those double-decker buses. In 1949, he began tracing the heart-attack rates of hundreds of drivers and conductors. The drivers sat for 90 percent of their shifts; the conductors climbed about 600 stairs each working day. Dr. Morris’s data, published in 1953, indicated that the conductors had fewer than half the heart attacks of their sedentary colleagues.

In a follow-up study, Dr. Morris found that a lower incidence of heart attack among people doing physical work was not, for the most part, related to other factors, like body type. Transport for London, the city’s transportation agency, provided him with the sizes of the trousers it supplied to its workers. His data indicated that the conductors’ waistbands were smaller, but that their protection against heart attack could not be explained by their relative leanness. They had a lower risk of heart attack whether they were slim, average size or portly.

To corroborate his findings further, Dr. Morris did a study of postal workers. Comparing those who delivered the mail by walking or riding bicycles with the clerks behind the window at the post office and the telephone operators, he found that the deliverers also had a far lower risk of heart attack. ...

I suspect there must have been young scientists all over the world who read that and asked: why can't I come up with something quite so simple? Alas, I suspect all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. And anyway, it's a knack.

[No real reason for the late posting; I just forgot about it until now.]