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To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Metropolitan
Borough of Lambeth.
Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present to you the 92nd Annual Report on
the health of the Borough of Lambeth.
In 1857 the work of the Medical Officer of Health, William
Odling, M.B., M.R.C.P., F.R.S., and two inspectors of nuisances,
who were the entire staff of the Public Health Department, was
recorded on two of the pages of a 27-page Annual Report of the
Proceedings of the Vestry of Lambeth. By the time George Puckle,
M.D. (1863-71) was appointed Medical Officer of Health the report
had been enlarged to nine pages, recording the nuisances abated
and the births, deaths and epidemic diseases in the year.
M. J. McCormack, M.B. (1871-76) succeeded George Puckle and was
followed by Archer Farr (1876-81), Firth Groves (1881-83) and
H. Walter Verdon, M.D., F.R.C.S. (1883-1894). The Annual
Report for 1894 had by this time grown to a 112-page document,
but still confined to vital statistics, epidemic diseases and the
improvement of environmental conditions.
It was not until my predecessor in office, Joseph Priestley,
B.A., M.D. (1895-1927) had been Medical Officer of Health for a
number of years that any expansion of the Council's Public Health
activities was extended to the personal health services. It was in
1899 that the bacteriological laboratory was set up, and utilised
no doubt with grave misgivings at first by the medical profession.
The first of the direct personal services was the milk depot
established in 1905, which supplied pasteurised diluted cows' milk
suited to the needs of infants of various ages, mainly in the
Guardians' Hospital of St. Mary's, Brook Drive. This was followed
after considerable debate in the Council by the temporary appointment
for one year of a " female health visitor " at £80 per annum,
who started on 1st January, 1906. From those two small ventures
grew the Lambeth Maternity and Child Welfare scheme, which had
at one time the equivalent of fifteen welfare centres, a maternity
home and, later, nine nurseries. The scheme was closely linked
with almost all the large hospitals in London, and rightly took much
of the credit for the reduction of infantile mortality from 127 per
1,000 live births to the present rate of 27 for 1948.
The whole of the Council's Maternity and Child Welfare scheme
was handed over, together with the administrative staff, as a going
concern on the 5th July, the appointed day, to the County Council,
while the two tuberculosis dispensaries were curiously divided
between the County Council and the South Western and South