Preventive medicine and public health activity are currently popular issues because of the spiralling cost of curative health services.'In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the crusade t o make the lives of Ontarians longer and healthier was not considered of paramount importance by any level of government or by the mass of the inhabitants.Nevertheless, from very humble beginnings in 1882, organized public health work in the province expanded to encompass not only concern for the environment but also t o offer programmes designed to enhance personal hygiene habits.Within this gradual evolution, three specific lines of development are discernible.First, the provincial government accepted responsibility for supervising public health activities with the creation of the first permanent Provincial Board of Health in the early 1880s.The Board worked diligently t o eradicate and control outbreaks of infectious diseases such as smallpox, typhus, typhoid, diphtheria and scarlet fever as well as to ameliorate the most outstanding environmental abuses, but it was not granted even partial departmental status until 19 19 when it was allied with the Department of Labour.Not until 1924 did health work receive full recognition with the establishment of a formal Department of Health for the province of Ontario, With the addition of hospitals and mental health services t o its jurisdiction between 1930 and 1935, a new phase began.2Second, although many Ontario cities possessed local boards of health by the 1880s, these were generally moribund and ineffective.3With the impact of industrialization during the next three decades, municipal authorities found themselves being pressured by both the Provincial Board and committed lay and medical reformers to take action to lower death rates and to improve living and working conditions.City councils in centres such as Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Kingston and Windsor 1
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