Abstract
Public health underwent further redefinition during the 20th century. The focus on mothers and babies heightened during World War I, and after the war a ‘public health empire’ developed in the UK. In the interwar years, public health seemed to be a key to the future of national health services, but after World War II this hope proved to be false. ‘The rise of lifestyle: 1900–1980s’ shows how changing patterns of disease—the epidemiologic transition—as well as the changes in health services, encouraged public health as a profession to seek out new avenues as part of a questioning of the authority of clinical medicine in the 1970s.
