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Crayford Urban District Council
To the Chairman and Members of the Urban District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present my Annual Report for
the year 1954.
The assessment of the health of the District 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
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