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involve considerable difficulty in a scattered Rural District.
The information should be given in this District in return for
that habitually supplied to schools, warning them of the
existence of infectious disease in houses that send children to
them, and, of course, should include diseases other than measles.
This leads me to observe, however, that schools, and school
arrangements generally, are greatly in need of medical supervision.
That the aggregation of children in schools favours the
spread of infectious disease is an established fact, but beyond
that many of the school operations themselves, and even their
domestic arrangements, seem to have been expressly devised to
facilitate the introduction and dissemination of diseases of this
class. An intimate association of medical supervision with even
the smallest details of school life is the only means by which
dangerous customs, deeply ingrained in school authorities by
long continued use, could be broken down, and by which at
the same time valuable information as to various diseases
common in children could be secured first hand and systematically,
while preventive and corrective measures would be
under direct medical control.
VII.—WATER SUPPLY.
The District is mainly supplied with water by three water
companies, viz., the Lambeth Water Company, who obtain
water from the River Thames, and the Sutton and East Surrey
Water Companies, both of whom obtain their supplies from
the Chalk at Sutton and Kenley respectively. The Croydon Corporation
also supplies a small population at Addington. About
16,000 persons consume water derived from the River Thames,
and 15,000 that derived from the Chalk, and there are some 200
to 250 persons who have no supply except rain-water collected
in tanks. Beyond these sources there are, of course, private
wells here and there.
The difficulty of providing the bulk of those without any
supply but rain-water, which was referred to on page 41 of the