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To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Borough of Erith
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to submit my Annual Report for the
year 1957.
As in previous years, in attempting to assess the health
of the Borough it is necessary to consider the vital statistics
for the area. The infant mortality rate for 1957 was 18.05
per 1,000 live births, compared with 12.35 in 1956 and a
rate for England and Wales of 23.1. In the past four years
this rate, which is a sensitive index of social conditions,
has been consistently lower than the rate for England and
Wales and is a matter for satisfaction. There was one
maternal death giving a maternal mortality rate of 1.47 per
1,000 total live and stillbirths. This was the first maternal
death in the Borough since 1952. For the eighth year there
has not been a case of diphtheria in the Borough. The
standardized birth rate was 14.45 per 1,000 of the population
compared with a rate of 16.1 per 1,000 for England
and Wales whilst the standardised death rate is 11.73 compared
with 11.5 for the country as a whole.
There is nothing in these figures to warrant either concern
or undue complacency. When one observes the great
changes wrought in our civilisation by the industrial, social,
educational and scientific developments of the past 50 years
and their profound influence on our whole way of life, one
cannot help feeling that the yardsticks used in the past to
measure the health of a community need to be interpreted
with great caution. Designed as they originally were for
conditions of widespread povety and disease and the absence
of medical care they served, in bygone years, not only as a
measure of environmental hazards but, also, as a spur to
their amelioration. Nowadays, however, having overcome
the gross hazards of environment we can turn our attention
to the more insidious and subtle ones which remain, as well
as to the new hazards which are constantly arising as a
result of the application of scientific developments as, for
example, in the field of nuclear physics.
A good example of the subjection of present-day vital
statistics to the high power of the microscope is afforded
by the study of infant mortality where the emphasis has
shifted from the main causes of death during the first year
of life (which at one time were gastro-enteritis and broncho-