M'Gonigle, George Cuthbert Mura

This collection is arranged in sections as follows:

A. Personal and career

B. Correspondence and subject files

C. Notes and drafts

D. Interdepartmnetal Committee on Abortion [Birkett Committee]

E. Publications by M'Gonigle

F. Presscuttings and collected publications

George Cuthbert Mura M'Gonigle was born in 1888, the only son of Canon M'Gonigle, Vicar of Ellingham and a member of the Northumberland County Council. He graduated from the University of Durham in 1910 and then held posts at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. From September 1911 until January 1912 he was Medical Officer to the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Dispensary and then, until June 1914, Deputy Superintendent at the Home Office Institution for Defectives at Rampton. From 1914 M'Gonigle was Assistant School Medical Officer, Durham County Council. He also served in France and Italy during the First World War, including as a sanitary officer in the RAMC. In 1924 he became Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, a post that he held until his death in 1939.

M'Gonigle first became well known in 1933, following a paper entitled 'Poverty, nutrition and public health' which he read before the epidemiological section of the Royal Society of Medicine. In this he noted that the death rate was higher on a new housing estate in Stockton than it had been in an old slum area. M'Gonigle contended that this was because the high rents meant that families had less money to spend on food. With this paper M'Gonigle publicly entered the topical debate on the relationship between unemployment, poverty, nutrition and health. He was henceforth in great demand for service on committees concerned with nutrition and as a writer, lecturer and broadcaster on the topic. Notably he was honorary secretary of the BMA's Nutrition Committee and took an active part in drawing up its controversial 'minimum diets'. His book Poverty and Public Health was published by Gollancz in 1936 and also issued by the Left Book Club. In this, M'Gonigle expanded on his view that malnutrition among the poor was the result of poverty, not ignorance.

In addition to his work on nutrition, M'Gonigle was interested in broader areas of public health, including housing, school health, maternity and child welfare, birth control. He also served on the Interdepartmental Committee on Induced Abortion (the Birkett Committee).

Further biographical information may be found in the Oxford DNB; Susan McLaurin,The Housewives' Champion (1997); and Susan McLaurin, Unemployment and health: the work of Dr G. C. M. M'Gonigle, 1924–1939 (unpublished MA dissertation, University of Teesside, 1996).