By late in the 19th century, many of these factors had been clarified. The stage was set for the health reforms that included the sanitary revolution, the beginnings of a social safety net, provision of immunizations, nutritional supplements for school children, prenatal care for pregnant women, and other essential public health functions we take for granted 100 years later. It required a dedicated army of public health workers to achieve all this.

I have singled out Hippocrates, Fracastorius, Graunt, Lind, Jenner, Snow and Pasteur as public health pathfinders on the road to good health. Their patients – or experimental subjects – Lind’s sailors, James Phipps, Joseph Meister, all others known and unknown by name, should be remembered and honoured too.

Many others belong in their company: Ignaz Semmelweiss and Oliver Wendell Holmes both understood better than the heavy-handed Joseph Lister that cleanliness is essential to prevent childbed fever and other hospital-acquired infections; the great German pathologist Rudolph Virchow recognized that political action as well as rational science is necessary to initiate effective action to control public health problems; Edwin Chadwick and Lemuel Shattuck reported on the appalling sanitary conditions associated with the unacceptably high infant and child death rates that prevailed in 19th century industrial towns; William Farr established vital statistics in England as a model for other nations to follow. And so the list grows from a handful of public health pathfinders to whole armies.

More was needed than scientific discoveries. These had to be applied, and this often required drastic changes in the established social and economic order. So other pathfinders appear on the road to health.

They included politicians, administrators, journalists, creative writers, performing artists, cartoonists. The journalists, creative writers and artists who transmit the scientific concepts of public health to the general public and to the politicians are indispensable partners in the team that makes it possible for us to advance up the road to better health.