This lecture focuses on a paper that Jerry Morris published in the Lancet o
f Saturday 18 October 1969 entitled Tomorrow's Community Physician.(1) It w
as a seminal paper in which a vision of the role and potential of a new bre
ed of public health practitioner was set out. The themes raised in the orig
inal paper which examined population health and health service issues, are
revisited, by assessing how things have changed, and in particular examinin
g the extent to which the vision set out in the paper has become reality ov
er the last 30 years.