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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health.
13
pitislj of Saint (Lkorgc tbc gliutnr, Soutbfoavh.
ANNUAL REPORT
MADE TO THE VESTRY
by the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
FOR THE YEAR ENDING LADY-DAY, 1866.
Mb. Chairman and Gentlemen,
Having now arrived at the end of the first ten years of your labours as Vestrymen,
let us pause and take a retrospective view of the way we have come, contrasting the present
condition of the Parish with its condition when you first met together.
Ten years in such a vast work—a work of draining, sewering, road-making, and building,
whereby the social and domestic habits of a people are to be changed, is but a little
while. It is but the commencement of a work which will have to continue, as long as
ignorance, neglect, apathy, and inherited evil tendencies are to be met with. Sanitary
science has been in practical operation for the short period of the third part of a generation,
to perform the herculean task of removing the accumulated evils—the growth of many
centuries of neglect. The initiatory proceedings of vestries have sufficed to make daily
more manifest 'the gigantic undertaking which they were organized to perform; and the
public, now for the first time fully alive to the evils that exist, are apt to conclude that
their origin dates from the time of their discovery, and to cast reproach and blame on the
very means whereby those evils have been made patent, and to a certain extent, even at
this early period ameliorated. Although we as individuals reckon our experience from a
time "when sanitary reform, so far from being popular, was considered one of the shams and
delusions of the day, we must not forget that Vestries, the bodies authorized for carrying
out sanitary reform, have had only a few years experience from which to deduce methods
°f overcoming the difficulties which they find to be considerably greater than were ever