Looking Backward and Forward

Abstract

feel much nostalgia because it is almost exactly 23 years ago to the day that I first set foot in this country to avail myself of the wisdom that was and still is here on matters affecting air pollution. I came over after the 1952 London smog to sit at the feet of many great men (some of whom, alas, are no longer with us) and I speak here today with a feeling of very great humility and the odd lump in the throat. You have set me, however, a most difficult task because after-dinner speaking in my country is a kind of art form and not a task performed in cold sobriety. It is done with great delicacy, just to keep people awake but not to hurt them, and it is never done from a podium but from a slightly crouching position over the table and with a chap in hunting pink behind you to catch you if you fall. The dilemma I find myself in is that one ought to entertain, but when I wrote to Dr. Shils I got a very polite but slightly scandalized letter saying that he rather hoped that I would instruct and talk about my experience of air pollution and my verdict on current work. I have to obey my instructions and at least give some sort of semiserious account. To tell how it is in the United Kingdom at present without telling how it was and therefore to make no mention of the gradient would be futile and extremely boring. My involvement in pollution dated from 1952, when London was obliterated by smog. I was summoned to help Professor Christie, then a consultant-advisor to the Ministry of Health, to read the proofs of the Gray Book, the famous document many of you know so well: Public Health Report No. 95, Morbi(dity canid Mortality durinig the Lond(lo Fog, 1952. To remind you of the severity of an incident many of us took for granted, my first task recorded in my laboratory notebook was to see *Presented as part of a Svinposiumz on Environimcental Ekfelts of Sulfur Oxides and Reltited P(irticulates sponsored by the Subcommittee on Public Health Aspects of Energy of the Committee on Public