The Chadwick Centenary Lecture ‐ A Review of Two Centuries of Public Health

Sir Edwin Chadwick, who has been recognized as the father of British sanitary science, died in 1890. This lecture commemorates the centenary of his death. It describes the appalling sanitary conditions existing in the early nineteenth century, traces the achievements made during the life of Chadwick, and reviews the influence these have had on the development of public‐health engineering in the UK and internationally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The lecture concludes with some reflections on contemporary issues related to environmental health and the future role of the environmental engineer.