This lecture focuses on a paper that Jerry Morris published in the Lancet of Saturday 18 October 1969 entitled Tomorrow's Community Physician. It was a seminal paper in which a vision of the role and potential of a new breed of public health practitioner was set out. The themes raised in the original paper which examined population health and health service issues, are revisited, by assessing how things have changed, and in particular examining the extent to which the vision set out in the paper has become reality over the last 30 years.