ABSTRACT
We are at the threshold of change; in many ways this new millennium provides a defining moment for fundamentally rethinking the role and function of environmental health. Environmental health has in fact been here before; a similar moment in the UK occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when urbanization and industrialization brought millions of people together in crowded, sprawling and insanitary settlements. In response, society underwent a period of rapid change. New models for the delivery of public services were introduced – the municipal corporations of the 1830s and the new Boards of Health, largely conceived to deal with outbreaks of communicable disease and to afford basic measures of health protection. Subsequently, a new concept of health arose: the idea of public health. New philosophies for the delivery of education and other public services began to take shape, and a new form of democracy evolved – extended suffrage, which became universal in the early twentieth century.
