View report page

has been exceedingly few and they are difficult to recruit. We have however
on the staff of the health department health visitors who have wide knowledge
of social and health conditions, and who, with an extension of their knowledge
of psychiatry are well equipped to tackle the functions of mental health in the
early stages. With health visitors we can then begin to cover a wider field of
incipient mental ill health, beginning in the present clinics. With this aim in
view we are trying to arrange for two or three health visitors to receive instruction
from our psychiatrist. Some day we may see the functions of preventive
mental health carried out on an area basis by the present health visiting staff,
and putting forward the concept of mental health on a social basis far wider
than hitherto envisaged.
We may look forward to the time when the functions of the old relieving
officers—now duly authorised officers—will become a subordinate duty carried
out by health visitor social workers as part of their wider social medical duties.
They would then work in close partnership with the general practitioners and
health departments, constituting the first stage in the preventive defence against
mental breakdown, and seeing the patients far in advance of the stage of
incarceration in a mental hospital, which should be the last resort of all.
THE RIDDLE OF DISEASED ARTERIES
Some Causes of Death.

These causes of death include a number of different pathological causes. If we
try to sort them out according to cause we can re-arrange them roughly as in
the following table:—
12