IT’S SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND—IT’S GETTING VERY NEAR THE END

In this issue, as we near the end of 10 years’ of editing this journal it must be time for some reflection on what we’ve seen, not just during this period but during our professional working lives. A significant proportion of the Editorial Board fall loosely into the category of baby-boomers now looking forward to really changing the world, freed from the constraints of institutional employment.

Perhaps the most important contribution this month, in the light of the above remarks, is Heather MacDougall’s offering in public health past and present. She comments on A new perspective on the health of Canadians, the seminal Canadian Green Paper published by Marc Lalonde in 1974, was such a tipping point in the movement to the new public health. MacDougall explores the experience of Canada, the UK and the USA in the light of Lalonde, and concludes that, as was the case with the sanitary idea, new ideas such as germ theory, …