Isaac Ladipo Oluwole was born in 1892 to Bishop Isaac Oluwole. Ladipo is the first Nigerian Medical Officer of Health for the Lagos Colony, recognized as the father of public health in Nigeria. He enrolled as a medical student at the University of Glasgow in 1913 and graduated in 1918. Before entering the colonial civil service on his return to Nigeria, he had established himself as a private Medical practitioner at Abeokuta. Ladipo started the first School of Hygiene in Nigeria, at Yaba in Lagos, in 1920.
With the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, Ladipo revamped port health Duties and made sanitary inspection a vital instrument for the control of communicable diseases using entirely the Nigerian sanitary inspectors. The first school health services in Nigeria started the following year. Ladipo is remembered for pioneering school healthy services with school inspections and the vaccination of children. He died in 1953 and a street in Ikeja has subsequently been named after him.
