He trained at Newcastle upon Tyne Medical School[2][failed verification], graduating from Durham University in 1910 (MD, 1913).
From 1924 until his relatively early death from pneumonia in 1939, he was a general practitioner of medicine and served as Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, an industrial town which, during the Great Depression, suffered one of the worst unemployment rates in Britain, peaking at around 50%.
This counter-intuitive finding was explained by poverty: M'Gonigle established that housewives could no longer afford a balanced diet for their families as household rents increased and income dwindled with unemployment.
His book with John Kirby, Poverty and Public Health (1936) [5] brought these matters to the attention of politicians and social reformers,[6] and set the Stockton studies in a broader context.
[7][12][13][14][15] In 2012, Durham University named one of their medicine lecture theatres at Queens Campus, Stockton in honour of M'Gonigle and his work in the local area.