Sir John Simon: a role model for public health practice?

Sir Donald Acheson, Sir Kenneth Calman, Sir Liam Donaldson and Professor Dame Sally Davies are names familiar to many reading this, as recent and current Chief Medical Officers of Her Majesty’s Government. Their forebear though is probably less familiar to us. Sir John Simon (1816–1904), pronounced in the French form, was the City of London’s first Medical Officer of Health and the first Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales. Born of French parents, he was brought up in the City of London and was apprenticed as a surgeon at the age of 17 and admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1838 (Lambert, 1963).

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Pioneers in Public Health: Lessons from History on 19/03/2017, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138059450 or http://www.crcpress.com/9781138059450