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still not dealt with. Of course the density of persons per dwelling in these
families is far higher than the 2.8 of pre-war days. The unhoused families
are living with parents or in rooms let off, or sometimes in one single furnished
room, and a few in caravans. In 1946, 10,000 people came into the Borough
from elsewhere. It is astonishing where they all found dwellings. Twickenham
has very few building sites left; within the boundaries of the Borough there
is no hope of these people finding separate dwellings. The domestic hardships,
the bickering and squabbling over kitchens, the restricted activity of children,
the inability to achieve domestic comfort and happiness, are exacting a heavy
toll in mental health and efficiency. The pressure on the school accommodation
is also very severe.
Sickness or Health.
Substandard Fitness.
Without in any way belittling the tremendous progress which has been
made in medical science and the social conditions, mankind today remains
appallingly unhealthy. What are the indications of this ? To quote just a few;
witness the crowded hospitals, the overflowing doctors' surgeries, the volume
of sickness absenteeism in industry, and the millions of pounds spent every
year by people on patent medicines in addition to the doctors' prescriptions,
which also cost millions.
What are the causes ? One important cause of ill health is ignorance of
the basic facts about health; but by far the most important is faulty nutrition;
it is the one over which we have most control as individuals and as a nation.
Substandard Food.
My sanitary inspectors spend a lot of time examining food—particularly
meat—alleged to be unfit for human consumption; they find that whilst
much of it is obviously of poor quality or even very stale, yet they cannot
condemn it as unfit for human consumption. This provides a clue to one
of the major causes of faulty nutrition—poor quality and lack of freshness
of food.
Wild animals obtain their food in a natural form, fresh and uncooked.
It is no coincidence that they are not beset by the diseases of civilisation,
for example heart and chest disease, cancer, stroke, rheumatism and
tuberculosis.
Every day in the deaths column of the newspapers you can read that
a man died suddenly aged about 53 years. His death was probably due to
coronary thrombosis, a disease in which the arteries of the heart gradually
get narrower and narrower, so interfering with an adequate blood supply to
the heart muscle itself. The end comes suddenly with a complete blockage
of an imp6rtant coronary artery. The disease is caused by degeneration or
premature old age of the artery walls. I sometimes wonder whether these
premature degenerative changes in the blood vessels are not due to deficiencies
of certain essential substances in our diet. We already know a great deal
about the vitamins and trace elements which are necessary for healthy living,
but our knowledge is still incomplete and we can never be sure that we are not
overlooking some important factor.
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