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7
not this be left as an evil to our time, that it may hereafter become
a monument and trophy to the good we may be able to effect ?
The blackness of the picture ought not to be a ground for despair, but
a call to greater effort. If we once determine to make that effort,
who shall say how soon we shall be enabled to reverse the picture ?
Prevailing Sickness.
At first sight it might strike a casual observer that the register of mortality
of a district furnished a good index to the amount and intensity
of the sickness of that district, and that the one was a fair measure of the
other; but it is not so in reality. Particular diseases may and often do
prevail at a time when the deaths from those diseases are but very few ;
and the reverse may be the case. I believe the only way in the absence
of returns from private practitioners, to arrive at even an approximate
estimate of the amount of disease prevailing in a district, is to analyse
the weekly records of sickness kept by the Union Medical Officers, and
to obtain if possible, a similar analysis of returns which could be furnished
by the Medical Officers of Local Public Institutions. The first
of these analyses your Medical Staff (being all Medical Officers under
the Poor law), can of course, (as they have already done) accomplish
without difficulty. The other analysis it is thought, can only be
accomplished successfully through the mediation of the Board,
and hence my colleagues have requested me to appeal to the
Board, in this Report, for its assistance in carrying into effect the
suggestion of the Association of the Medical Officers of Health of the
Metropolis, that " Application should be made through the medium of
the Vestry or District Boaid, to the Managing Committee or Board of
each Institution, for permission to obtain the information required."
The importance of collecting these valuable statistics, and of embodying
them as it is proposed to do, in a weekly publication under the authority
of the General Board of Health, cannot be over estimated; and I shall
have great pleasure in more fully explaining the proposed scheme and
its requirements, whenever it is convenient to this Board or its Sanitary
Committee to afford me an opportunity of doing so.
A reference to Table IV. in the appendix will show, that 1140 cases
of sickness &c., were treated by the Union Medical Officers during the
past quarter, and that 36 only of those cases terminated fatally. The
same table will also exhibit the gratifying fact, that both the sickness
and mortality amongst the pauper population of the District was