The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Abstract

Thistory of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the new home of which was opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales on July 18, goes back to 1921, when a committee appointed by the Minister of Health of that day, Sir Alfred Mond, now Lord Melchett, under the chairmanship of the Earl of Athione, to report upon the needs of post-graduate medical education in London, advocated among other things the establish-ment of a central institute of preventive medicine. This recommendation began to bear fruit in the following year, when the Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York generously offered £460,000 for the building and equipment of such an institute, if the British Government would be responsible for its staffing and maintenance. In the course of their campaign of preventive medicine in all parts of the world, the authorities of the Rockefeller Foundation had arrived independently at the conclusion that a great teaching centre of this nature, with an international outlook, was required if the teachings of hygiene were to be adequately promulgated; and they realised that London, as the capital of the British Empire, the centre of the worlds commerce, and the cradle of modern public health administration, would form the ideal site.