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10
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORT
For 1909.
To the Chairman and Members of the Willesden
District Council.
Gentlemen,
I beg leave to submit the thirty-fourth Annual Report
on the health and sanitary circumstances of Willesden.
The work of the Public Health Department steadily increases as
year by year Parliament throws greater and more extended responsibilities
upon local authorities.
The last few years have witnessed a silent revolution in the
nature and province of public health administration. The venue may
be said not so much to have changed as to have expanded so as to
embrace not only the environment, which was more particularly the
object of solicitude in the past, but the personal health and the habits
and conduct of the people upon which their physical well-being is
conditioned.
This change in the province, which properly may be considered to
fall within the domain of public concern and control, is viewed approvingly
or with hostility from varying standpoints, but with these the
administrator as such is less concerned than with the execution of the
measures which, however they be viewed, are imposed by statutory
obligations, the outcome of the inevitable exigencies of the time.
The protection of the expectant mother and the care and
instructed nurture of her offspring mark the commencement of a
sustained communal interest which is continued through childhood