BA Camb 1910, MA 1920, MD 1917, MB BCh 1914, DPH 1918; MB ChB Manch 1913.
Stocks was chief medical statistician to the General Register Office and was an internationally renowned medical statistician. He was born on 5 November 1889 and was educated at Manchester Grammar School before studying at Cambridge and Manchester. He had at first intended to be a civil engineer, but later decided to become a medical missionary. He went to Burma with the Wesleyan Missionary Society, but was forced to return home and gained a commission with the RAMC. Stocks began his career in medical statistics in 1921 when he was appointed to the Galton Laboratory, London, where he remained for 12 years. He began to apply his mathematical knowledge to medical problems and in 1933 he was appointed chief medical statistician to the General Register Office, where he remained until his retirement in 1950. Stocks was particularly known for his work on the International Classification of Diseases and for his maps of cancer mortality. After his retirement, Stocks continued working, first as senior research fellow of the Cancer Research Campaign, surveying cancer in North Wales and Merseyside, and then in the Inter-American Investigation of Mortality. Stocks made a number of significant observations based on statistics, including the shift from acute infections to chronic diseases, the value of exercise in heart conditions, and the effect of air pollution and smoking on respiratory disease. He was awarded the Jenner medal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Bisset Hawkins medal of the Royal College of Physicians. Stocks died on 18 December 1975.