He was educated at  Cheltenham Grammar School;[2][3] he was a precocious scholar and obtained a Demyship to study Natural Science at Magdalen College, Oxford in March 1861 and matriculated on 12 October 1861 at the age of 17.

[5] In the same year he was chosen to accompany Charles Daubeny, geologist and professor of chemistry at Oxford to examine the volcanoes in Montbrison in France.

Later Corfield said, in a discussion on preventing enteric fever at the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society: "On going through my original notes I have been forced to the conclusion that it was not a case in which the disease was conveyed by sewer air, because the persons who were most in the house did not get it.".

At the time a defective sewage pipe was considered the probable source of the infection, but in later years Corfield revised his view and felt that contaminated food or drink consumed at lunch at a shooting party was a more likely cause.

[7] Whatever the source of the infection, the incident served to focus attention on sanitation and in combination with a growth in local government responsibilities and spending, and the extension of the right to vote, led to sanitary reforms becoming a national priority.

[6][8] The revised Public Health Act of 1875 that followed contained many recommendations for improving towns, building sewage systems, and creating a mandatory inspectorate.

Corfield can be seen as a leader of a second wave of public health scientists who implemented many of the reforms advocated by earlier activists, such as Edwin Chadwick.

In 1873 following an extensive press campaign by Charles Murchison and William Jenner, Corfield was engaged along with John Whitmore, the local Medical Office of Health, and John Netten Radcliffe, the Medical Department's inspector, to investigate the potential role of milk supplied by the Dairy Reform Company in a severe outbreak of typhoid in Marylebone, London.

Murchison believed that the investigation publicised the risk of typhoid through contaminated milk (previously water had been considered the major vector), and encouraged preventive legislation which was eventually enacted in the 1880s.

[10] Following the death of his friend and colleague, Edmund Parkes in 1876, he actively promoted the creation of a museum of practical hygiene in London as a memorial.

[11] The Parkes Museum of Hygiene was opened in 1879; its patrons included Queen Victoria, other members of the Royal Family, Cabinet Ministers and representatives of several of the ancient Guilds of the City of London.