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4
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Borough of Erith
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
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