London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972

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Wandsworth 1884

[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Wandsworth District, The Board of Works (Clapham, Putney, Streatham, Tooting & Wandsworth)]

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in the above local report, are likewise nominally insisted
on in the code of rules issued by the London School
Board to its teachers, and which hang on the walls of
their school-rooms. These regulations state that "any
child showing symptoms of an infectious disease, or any
child coming from a house where an infectious disease
exists, must be sent home at once. The medical officer
of health for the district must at the same time be
informed of the child's exclusion, and furnished with the
name and address of the child, and the reason for its
exclusion." That these regulations are almost entirely
a dead letter cannot be doubted.
Your Medical Officers hope that measures will be
taken by the School Board Authorities for ensuring the
fulfilment of these existing regulations, which at present
are seldom or ever put in force.
In addition to the sanitary work synopsised in
Table VI., various proceedings which have not been thus
tabulated have occupied the attention of your officials
during the past year, such as the systematic inspection of
bakehouses, cowhouses, and slaughter-houses, attendances
at the Police Court, and many special inspections of vour
Medical Officers.
One of the most important portions of the sanitary
work of the district is its Scavenging. The lack of efficiency
of the contractors' work in dust-removal has repeatedly
come under your consideration. An arrangement which
renders it to the interests of the contractors to remove
the house refuse as infrequently as possible, and in
which the poorer houses are not so likely to be served as
others, owing to the deficient fees to dust-men, can
hardly be regarded as satisfactory. In the Poplar
District pails have been substituted for the foul brick-