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Hospital Wards filled with groaning, shrieking, contorted
children actually held in the pangs of the disease, and with
whom nothing could be done but to narcotise the horrible pain,
whilst even those who had evaded death were poor, pale, pinched,
shrunken, paralysed, blind or deaf creatures. Not only this
but the causation of the disease was, and still is, baffling all
known sanitary measures. There are quarters in St. Marylebone
where, if this disease should ever gain a footing, it would simply
revel. Your Council know full well to what localities I allude.
Measures to improve these places should never be relaxed,
despite the conflict with vested interests which will always
result. The tenement houses in Burne Street, Rathbone Place,
Gresse Street, Capland Street, Upper Charlton Street, Virgil
Place, and Nightingale Street, are some of which, during my
term of office, I have learned the conditions, and I ask you as
a Council, when dealing with insanitary conditions in these and
similar localities, to remember that misplaced leniency will be
like sowing a wind the whirlwind of which in the form, not
merely of lessened general health, especially of the young
generation, but in the form of phthisis, cerebro-spinal
meningitis, and other destroyers of vitality, will very shortly be
reaped.
MEASLES.
A considerable number of cases of measles have been
reported during the year from the various schools. In only two
cases, however, has the number of infected children been a serious
one. In these two cases your Medical Officer of Health paid a visit
to the school concerned and made enquiries into the circumstances
attending the outbreak. With the co-operation of the County
Council (Education) Medical Officer, measures were devised,
such as the exclusion of unprotected children, the prevention of
the assembling of children together in the early morning, and for
such lessons as singing, etc., by which it was found possible to
avert any such harsh measures as the closure of the school or
any department thereof.
PHTHISIS.
1 here were 154 deaths recorded from pulmonary phthisis
during 1908, a number equivalent to the deaths of 1.21 persons
out of every thousand persons in the district. Taking the deaths
from other tubercular diseases into account, the total is thereby
raised to 203, equal to a death rate of 1.70 per thousand of the
estimated population.
The sad thing about these deaths from phthisis is that the
disease does its fell work chiefly during the period of early