Aaron Antonovsky

Aaron Antonovsky was born in 1923 in Brooklyn

Antonovsky was born in Brooklyn in the United States in 1923. He earned his PhD at Yale University.

He moved to Israel in 1960. In Jerusalem he worked at the Israeli Institute for Applied Social Research and in the Department of Medical Sociology at the Hebrew University. His early research looked at how social class affects illness and death rates.

In 1972 he helped found the medical school at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he held the Kunin-Lunenfeld Chair in Medical Sociology. There he developed salutogenesis, presented in his 1979 book Health, Stress and Coping and his 1987 book Unraveling the Mystery of Health. A central idea of the theory is the sense of coherence, which he measured with a questionnaire developed with his wife Helen in 1987.

Antonovsky died in Jerusalem in 1994. Research on salutogenesis continues around the world, and his son Avishai Antonovsky works in the field.