Introduction: the first 100 years

Abstract

The journal that is now Epidemiology & Infection was founded in 1901 as the Journal of Hygiene ‘to fulfil a definite purpose by serving as a focus to English-speaking investigators for works in physics, chemistry, physiology, pathology, bacteriology, parasitology and epidemiology in relation to hygiene and preventive medicine’. In 1987 the name of the journal was changed to Epidemiology & Infection. The reasons for this change were articulated by John Pattison [1] on one of the few occasions that the Editor has directly addressed the readership and formalized the historic shift towards microbiology and epidemiology.