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4
are excellent in removing the likelihood of complacency. In considering
questions of the moment, however, we should not forget
what has been accomplished. The chief value of the annual reports
of Medical Officers of Health is probably that they present an
annual examination of the health of the community on a basis
which allows reasonable comparison between one generation and
another. If we select 1927 as being nine years after a world war,
perusal of the Report tof the Medical Officer of Health for Croydon
for that year shows beyond question how the health of the community
has improved in a manner which my predecess or may have deemed
it rash to prophesy. With a population of just over 200,000 the
death rate was 11.6 per 1,000 as compared with 9.5 for 1954.
There were 178 infant deaths in contrast with 69, so that the
infant mortality rate was then 56 as against 19 for 1954. Ten
children died from Diphtheria, a disease of which not a single
case was notified during the last 12 months. 21 children died
from Whooping Cough, 6 from Measles and 3 from Scarlet Fever,
whereas these infections killed no child in Croydon last year.
In 1927, nine mothers died in childbirth and 203 deaths were
recorded from tuberculosis. The figures for 1954 were 3 maternal
deaths and 32 from tuberculosis. It is not only the mortality
rates which show such differences, but almost any section of the
1927 Report gives reason for sober satisfaction for progress made,
whether it is the figures of new cases attending the Venereal
Diseases Clinic or the percentage of verminous children or the
number of those crippled with rickets - a diagnosis which has
entirely disappeared.
It would be foolish for the Health Service to claim all the
credit for these changes, since they cannot be separated from the
general advance in social standards. It can be asserted with confidence,
however, that the services recommended and the advice
given in preventive medicine have, in the main, produced the
results which were anticipated. Members and officers now operating
the National Health Service are but the sucessors of those whose
achievements I have thus outlined. I think we shall succeed in
maintaining the example set to us.
In Croydon, co-operation between the branches of the Health
Service has remained close and cordial and assistance, when requested,
has always been readily forthcoming from the Executive
Council and the Group Hospital Management Committee. General
practitioners and hospital medical staff have been ready at all
times to co-ordinate action for individual patients whether in
connection with controlling infection, housing problems or the
innumerable other ways in which preventive and curative medicine
meet. In taking this opportunity to express the thanks of the
department, I would reaffirm that any apparent discourtesy during