ABSTRACT
The history of public health in the United Kingdom is inexorably linked to the demographic, social and economic upheaval that characterized the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. As millions of people flocked from the fields of small rural towns and villages in search of work, they crossed the threshold of the seething industrial cities that pitted the Victorian landscape. Hippocrates has relevance to the history of public health, not just to the foundations of clinical medicine. He was the first to seek to explain the origins of disease, and in so doing, he put forward many observations that do not seem out of place even today. The terms used to describe the epidemics that swept through the populations of the ancient and medieval worlds were generally nonspecific or vague: plague, the sweats or, more often, simply the ague. After the fall of the Roman Empire to the Barbarians, the mainly Greek-speaking part to the east was based on the city of Byzantium.
