Origins and development of the International Epidemiological Association.

725 professorship at Zagreb University as early as 1931, and for a similar position for John Ryle at Oxford in 1942.9 Because so many social medicine advocates were academics, a major effort targeted medical education in an attempt to inculcate more physicians with their point of view. Further reflecting their sense of mission, they sought to influence public policy toward extending medical services and other health endeavours to the entire population. And they held a third notion, namely, that international contacts would be helpful, especially getting to know and understand what was happening in other countries. Visits and correspondence among epidemiologists and social medicine enthusiasts led John Pemberton (Reader in social medicine Sheffield University, UK) and Harold Willard (Assistant Professor of Public Health, Cornell University, New York) to organize the International Corresponding Club (ICC) in 1955. They were advised by Professor Robert Cruickshank The aim of this paper is to present some reflections on the history and role of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), on the future of the health field, and to suggest a specific new challenge to epidemiology. The organizational history of the IEA has been well covered in several publications.1–4 The IEA originated in response to several aspects of the medical and public health situation in the 1950s. Health leaders in the UK, US, and other industrialized nations were recognizing in their countries the ‘epidemiologic transition’ i.e. the trend towards dominance of non-communicable diseases on the health scene, displacing the communicable diseases that had been most prominent earlier. Responding to that recognition some epidemiologists had begun applying epidemiological methods to find the origins of the newly ascendant diseases, and they were achieving some success, notably in the cases of lung cancer and ischaemic heart disease that had risen to importance as causes of death during the first half of the 20th century.