T WENTY years ago, when I first entered the field of public health, I had the good fortune to become an apprentice epidemiologist in the New York State Department of Health. The epidemiologic tradition was very strong in New York at that time; our seniors preferred to be members of the epidemiology section rather than the health officers section of the American Public Health Association, and it was no accident that we were called apprentice epidemiologists rather than health officers-intraining. Public health practice then was oriented to communicable disease epidemiology; among other duties as an apprentice health officer, I visited adults with chickenpox to make certain they did not have smallpox, investigated sporadic cases of typhoid fever and small outbreaks of food poisoning, assisted in immunization clinics, observed public health nurses teach families the care of communicable disease in the home, made contact investigations in syphilis, attempted to convince tuberculosis patients who were hazards to their families that they should a.cc,ept hospitalization, and learned the intricacies of the syphilis and tuberculos,is case registers. The main concerns, of the health departments were wa.ter and milk sanitation, maternal and child health, and the control of communicable diseases, of which syphilis, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis were the most important. There was a new program of cancer control, but our contact with it at the local level was limited to occasional visits to physicians to obtain further information on cases fo,r the cancer register. During my apprenticeship, I spent 1 month visiting the various divisions and bureaus in the central office in Albany. It was there I learned that a controversy had arisen in the department over the issue of whether public health nurses should do bedside nursing. It wasn't clear who had raised the issue, but apparently there was a great deal of resistance to such an extension of functions of public health nursing in official agencies. At any rate, nothing came of it; during the next few years that I was with the department, I heard no further discussions of this question, and no bedside nursing programs were introduced. As I look back upon that period, I am impressed with the absence of any sense of crisis or uncertainty. There was a lot of work to be done, protecting mothers and children and fighting major communicable disea.ses along established lines, and nobody, or hardly anybody, was asking that agonizing question which preoccupied the public health movement in the fifties: "Where are we going in public health?" The past serenity of the public health movement has been shattered by a curious paradox. The fight against disease has resulted in an increase in disease, or, more exactly, the very successes of public health in preventing disease have created a population which suffers more disease than ever before. This seems inconceivable at first glance, a crude and monstrous joke which bears no relation to reality. Nevertheless, it is true. Public health achieved brilliant successes in preventing infants from dying of diarrheal diseases, mothers from dying in childbirth, and children and Dr. Terris is head of the chronic disease unit, division of epidemiology, Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York, Inc. The paper is based on an address given at a series of regional conferences sponsored by the department of public health nursing of the National League for Nursing held in April 1962.