ABSTRACT
In a recent book, Jeanette Mitchell (1984) examines a range of popular misconceptions about ill-health. One of these is the myth that ill-health usually strikes at random, or as she puts it ‘without apparent rhyme or reason’. In order to evaluate this claim, she looks at some of the data from Geoffrey Rose and Michael Marmot’s (1981) study of mortality amongst a cohort of 17,000 male civil servants working in Whitehall, London. In the first seven years of the research, over a thousand civil servants died, almost half of them from heart attacks. However, when the data are examined more closely it seems that the lower the grade, the higher the mortality. For example, men in the lowest grades (messengers and those doing unskilled work) had a death-rate almost four times as large as the top civil servants. Similarly men in the clerical grades had a death-rate three times greater than those in the top grades, and men in the professional and executive grades had a deathrate twice that of their more senior colleagues. Clearly amongst people like these at least there is a clear pattern when it comes to mortality.
