Maurice King: physician who proposed a one child policy to combat overpopulation

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Maurice King said he was not ambitious to be a professor or head of department, rather he wanted “to make the world turn better.” He understood his efforts might not be received in the spirit they were made, however, quoting Molière’s maxim, “It is a madness like no other to want to interfere in correcting the world.”

“He loved people and wanted to improve healthcare but didn’t always choose the best way of expressing his ideas,” said his son Ben.

In 1990 a Guardian news story interpreted his Lancet paper, Health is a sustainable state,1 as a call for sick children in the developing world to be left to die. “Reduced childhood mortality must no longer be promoted as a necessary and sufficient condition for reduced mortality,” he wrote.

He argued that oral rehydration should not be introduced at a population level if there were no “complementary ecological sustaining measures” such as family planning, as this would “increase the man years of human misery.”

“However, the individual doctor must rehydrate his patient,” he said.

It was a nuanced argument and the Guardian article provoked angry letters from Unicef and …