Epidemiologic highlights of the past with a look towards the future

Since the first meeting of the American Public Health Association in 1873, epidemiology and epidemiologists have been central to the activities of the organization. At that meeting, the most prominent American physician of the time, Austin Flint, presented a classic paper entitled "Relations of Water to the Propagation of Fever." In that remarkable paper, Flint reinterpreted observations on the North Boston, N.Y. typhoid fever epidemic made 30 years earlier in which he had correctly concluded that the epidemic had been propagated by contagion, but incorrectly concluded that transmission was not the result of contaminated drinking water. During the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th, Annual Meetings of the APHA were frequently the locus for reports of epidemic investigations and the Journal of the Association was the vehicle for their publication. When the Association was reorganized to include discipline-oriented sections, the Epidemiology Section was among the first to be established. At the time, 1929, the Section was the only meeting place (outside the small and exclusive American Epidemiological Society) for epidemiologists to exchange ideas and information. The Section was also a place where public health policies were hotly debated. After World War II, academic departments of epidemiology increasingly focused the field on methodological issues and etiological investigations. Furthermore, new organizations and a plethora of epidemiological journals flooded the field. Thus, the Epidemiology Section has remained a major center for translating epidemiological knowledge into policy and is likely to intensify that function in the future.