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ANNUAL REPORT
of the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Borough of Bexley.
Mr Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present my Annual Report for the
year 1954.
The assessment of the health of the Borough is based
on a judicious mixture of knowledge and opinion. The
former is represented by the vital statistics relating to births,
deaths and infectious disease which are compiled in the
Health Department and are collated by the General Register
Office to allow for comparison with the country as a
whole; the latter is based on personal observation and on
information reaching the Department from doctors, sanitary
inspectors, health visitors, voluntary organisations and the
Press. In a highly developed modern community enjoying
the benefits of over a 100 years of Public Health one can
no longer be content to regard health as the mere absence
of infectious or other recognisable disease although this
was the case during the many decades when the amelioration
of the external environment was the main preoccupation
of the Health Services. This is not to suggest that all
the environmental hazards have been removed and, indeed,
this is far from being the case. It is true that we now have
a pure water supply which has almost totally eliminated
the diarrhoeal diseases but we are still confronted with the
perils of atmospheric pollution, of the chemical sophistication
of much of our food and of a host of less obvious but
equally insidious causes of loss of health, happiness and
efficiency including those resulting from industrial mechanisation
and sociological changes affecting work, recreation
and personal objectives. In other words, the state of a
modern civilised community must be judged far more from
the viewpoint of its mental health than was considered
necessary, or even possible, in earlier days. We have no
statistics to measure the mental health of the people
nor the amount of sub-normal health in general resulting
in a departure from that functional " wholeness " which is
the essence of health and, while it is true that such philosophical
speculations may lead one into fields far removed
from the conventional activities of the older public health,
they are, nevertheless, an important part of the newer social
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