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REPORT
of the Medical Officer of Health
for the year 1957
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present to you the Annual Report on the
health of the Borough for the year 1957.
Following precedent, the report is mainly statistical with comments
on the figures as may be necessary and in this introduction, I draw
your attention to some of the more interesting items which occurred
during the year.
The population of the Borough has been increasing over the past
two or three years due in the main to the new housing estates which
have been going up and are still going up in parts of the Borough.
In 1957, however, there was a levelling off of the population which,
in fact, was 20 fewer than in the previous year, being 337,580. The
crude birth rate for 1957 was 14.92 per 1,000 persons, a slight increase
over the previous year. The adjusted birth rate, taking into account
the area comparability figure, works out at 14.32. The crude death
rate for the year was 14.72 compared with 15.57 for 1956 but after
taking into account the area comparability figure, the adjusted rate
works out at 10.15 compared with 10.89 the previous year.
I referred in my report last year to the importance of the infant
mortality rate as a yardstick of the public health and social status
of a community, pointing out that in 1956 we had the lowest figure
ever recorded in Wandsworth, namely 17 per 1,000 live births. It is
highly gratifying, therefore, to record that this figure was even further