Environment and Health: Seventy Years After

When Doctor Payne honored me with an invitation to deliver the CharlesEdward Amory Winslow Lecture, I realized that I would be able to choose a subject from "an embarrassment of riches" in the contributions of Professor Winslow to the health of Man. I use here the title with which his students of a generation ago still revere his memory and signify the affection he inspired in them. He was to the end-a Professor. Public health was his profession. He studied it, taught it, practiced it with the singular talents God had bestowed upon him. What's more, he professed it. Whenever and wherever occasion offered, he stood up to be heard on behalf of human societies in search of health. Few of the world's health leaders have touched so many sectors of their field with the magic of a great personality as did Professor Winslow. Scientistinnovatorteacher administratorhistorianstatesman philosopher: In each of these roles he earned a permanent place of honor; not only among learned faculties, but among governments and private organizations throughout the world. Yet from such a varied background, I have had no hestitancy in choosing as my subject, "Environment and Health-Seventy Years After." To many public health students, the topic may forebode an hour-long paean of public health progress in the present century. Let me assure you, nothing could be farther from my intent. True, the triumphs of preventing infectious and nutritional deficiency diseases are worth recounting. No one delighted more in telling the story than Professor Winslow and he made it compelling by his transformation of the statistical evidence into vivid pictures of men, women, and children -alive, who might have died before their time. In 1894, however, it was not an apostle of public health who showed up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become one of William