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10
early disclosure of Tuberculosis by Mass X-ray; the improvement
in the physique of the school child; and the rarity of
Tuberculosis in the school child, and the great and astonishing
reduction in infant deaths during the past 30 years.
We tend to give new and high sounding names to old
conditions, eapecially since psychology has become the study of
all and sundry. Psychosomatic may be an excellent term but it
has always been known from time immemorial, and without the
issue of labels, that there is a co-relation in illness between mind
and body. The old type family doctor well knew that the way
to cure was through the confidence of the patient. It may be
that to-day we tend to weaken this confidence by broadcasting
to all and sundry, either by wireless, television or press, the
medical details of diseases that affect mankind. It would, in my
opinion, be better if we reserved our propaganda for the ways to
prevent disease and to promote health, leaving it to the family
doctor to tell the patient only what is, in his opinion, good for
his cure.
The task of the preventive services in future years will not
be an easy one but it is full of promise. In my view, the task
can only be lightened by truly local government, where the
people, the elected representative, and the official, live and work
together. In my first Annual Report to you 28 years ago, I wrote,
however badly it may have been expressed:—
"Local Government appears, by recent declaration in
Parliament, to be again in the melting pot; new large Health
authorities are to be formed However necessary this may
appear to be. I believe it is probably agreed that too much overlapping
of authority does exist, there is a distinct danger to the
efficient but sometimes small authority being swamped in an
authority which will lose touch with the unit of population. It is
on this individuality that the whole success of Pulblic Health has
resulted, to destroy it will, I fear, defeat our ends."
There has not yet been a return to the Town Council of the
duty to function any of the Part III Services, taken from us in
1948 by the National Health Service Act.
It is easy for one to generalise, but a review of the Public
Health Services must surely show that what is needed in an
industrial area is not necessarily good for or needed in a
residential area such as Bromley; we tend too much to run to
pattern and to continue that pattern over too long a period. An
extension of the Mass X-ray and an extension of Home Nursing
are two services which are desirable in Bromley, both of which