AsLocal Government Board Medical DepartmentMedical Officers’ Annual Reportsfinal report" \r "idxintern394 the Local Government Board disappeared into history in 1919, George Newman, newly appointed as Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health, wrote the Medical Department’s epitaph in his introduction to the forty-eighth and final Annual Report. Describing it as ‘the last in a famous series’, he paid tribute to the work of the Department and its staff over the previous 50 years. Despite Newman’s plaudits however it is his references to the Medical Department’s ‘limitations’ which have endured. A reputation that has been much influenced by the views of a coterie of contemporary critics and a patchy historiography have left the Department’s work and achievements poorly served by historians of public health in Britain. With its own records dominated by problem-solving and a core of work that was always preventive, success for the Medical Department often meant that nothing significant happened. That ‘nothing significant happened’ because of the Department’s efforts is lost in much historical assessment, and too often has evolved into ‘nothing significant was done’.