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Health Department,
Town Hall,
Hornsey, N.8.
To His Worship the Mayor, the Aldermen and the Councillors
of the Borough of Hornsey
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I beg to present my Annual Report on the health of the Borough and
the work of the public health department for the year ended 31st
December, 1952.
The publication of this report coincides with Hornsey's Jubilee
celebrations as a Municipal Borough under Royal Charter of Incorporation.
Over this fifty-year period annual reports of the Borough's medical
officers of health have given striking evidence of continuous progress
in the sphere of public health: in prevention of disease and betterment
of the environmental conditions in which the local community lives and
works. The story too is told of the establishment and expansion of the
personal health services; of the vision, energy and enthusiasm of the
Corporation's committees concerned, for so many years, with education
and maternity and child welfare, in addition to the work of the public
health committee. The origin and growth of the school medical service;
and the growth of the priority care for the expectant and nursing mother
and for the young child below school age. The provision of an isolation
hospital for the treatment of infectious disease, a maternity hospital
and the erection of clinic premises and nurseries designed to serve their
special purposes. All those who appreciate the value of things felt and
done locally may still feel some apprehension by the turn of events
since the last world war and the transfer away from the Borough of
much of the control over these and other local government services.
Statistics which have to be shown in Annual Reports of this kind are
sometimes regarded as dull reading ; but in fact the data they contain
are the only real means we have of assessing past progress and of
promoting future endeavour to meet the requirements of changing
trends in the pattern of health and disease. In this respect some comparison
may be drawn with conditions that existed at the opening of
the century fifty years ago.
In the year 1902 the population of the Borough was 73,992; today
this figure has risen to 99,140. The total area was 2,874 acres compared
with 2,872 acres at the present time giving a density of population
representing 25.7 persons per acre as compared with the density now
of 34.5. The birth rate then was 20.7 a figure considerably lower than
that of 28.3 per thousand inhabitants for the whole of England and
Wales. In Hornsey today the birth rate is 14.4 and is still lower than
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