Ken Rothman is a household name for epidemiologists all over the world. The appearance of his book ‘Modern Epidemiology’1 in the mid-1980s consolidated his reputation as a major thinker in our discipline. I remember finding his book truly inspirational when I first read it as a junior epidemiologist.

Rothman’s commentary on ‘The rise and fall of Epidemiology, 1950–2000 AD’, 2 however, made many epidemiologists worry. This paper, published in 1981, reads as if it had been written in the beginning of the 21st century, for presentation at the ‘John Graunt Literary Society’at Harvard in 2004, pretending to look back at the downfall of our discipline. According to Rothman, after the early contributions of Graunt and Farr, the field of epidemiology was ‘quiescent’until the end of the World War II, when several large-scale studies were started in the USA. The 1950s–80s represented a boom for epidemiology, and Rothman provides several examples of highly visible discoveries and controversies involving North American epidemiologists during this period. His commentary then shifts gears, starting to describe ‘the demise of epidemiology’. Ever tighter ethical restrictions enforced by institutional review boards either precluded largescale studies or increased their duration to such an extent that, according to Rothman, few young researchers were being attracted to the field. Rather than doing actual research, lobbying in political and legal arenas became the most attractive career choice for epidemiologists. Concerns about potential legal actions by study participants further threatened field studies. His paper ends with an exercise in futurology:‘a scientific discipline that evolved slowly and flourished briefly for several decades is now nearly gone, leaving behind some knowledge of disease prevention, a few controversial alarms, and a collection of techniques for assessing the health consequences of people’s actions.’It is easy to criticize with the benefit of hindsight, but Rothman clearly had it wrong. Epidemiology is currently thriving in most of the world. Whereas from 1970–79, 4.1% of PubMed citations included the word ‘epidemiology’in any field, this increased to 4.3% in 1980–89, 7.5% in 1990–99 and 8.8% in 2000–06. In addition, many new areas of application appeared or increased markedly since 1980—clinical, environmental, genetic and life-course epidemiology, to name a few. In terms of methodological advances, meta-analyses, cluster-randomized trials, multi-level methods are among the many developments.