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Public Health Department,
Elmfield House,
High Street,
Teddington.
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Borough of Twickenham.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to submit my Annual Report for 1955 on the health
and sanitary conditions of the Borough together with the supplement containing
the statistical tables for 1954 as required by the Ministry of Health.
I have drawn attention to the one remaining infectious disease of
importance left to be conquered. This is tuberculosis, producing in this town
year after year 100 new cases with all the attendant misery and disappointment,
frustration and anxiety it brings in its trail. We ought to have a mass
X-ray unit permanently stationed in the Borough so that everybody could be
given a chance of being X-rayed once a year. Little good comes of having the
mass X-ray unit in Twickenham for a fortnight in the winter. The apparatus
is contained in a van parked in York House yard; the people come to it in cold,
draughty and uncomfortable circumstances. Out of 105,000 people in the
Borough, just over 6,000 attend, so the other 99,000 go unexamined. Of
these, about 19,000 are children and young persons, so it still leaves 80,000
people untouched. We are only nibbling at the problem. In 1954 tuberculosis
killed off 26 people; road accidents killed 10 people, but we have set up a
special committee and made far more fuss over road accidents than we have
over tuberculosis. If the cause were smallpox there would be a public outcry.
It is curious how we become inured to evils; during the war we even got used
to bombs.
On another page I call attention to the amount of disability found among
elderly people. The Boer war drew attention to the poor quality of the recruits
going into the army and who were needed for the fighting services in those days.
This led to measures to improve the children of the country and brought into
being the maternity and child welfare and school health services. The increasing
number of elderly people is drawing attention to the need for conserving
their working ability and the need to lessen their dependence upon the younger
people. I now think we should put into effect preventive clinics for old people
as we have done for babies and young children.
About a year ago the Society of Medical Officers of Health and the British
Medical Association stressed the importance of co-operation amongst the three
branches of the National Health Service. In this division, Dr. Anderson
and I each sent out circulars reminding the general practitioners of the useful
services provided in the various clinics and especially the value of using the
health visitors for health education, for advice to mothers, for old people,
and in many other ways. I invited the practitioners to come to the clinics,
to phone or write to the health visitors, to get to know them personally and
to use them in their work in the same way as they have become accustomed to
with the district nurses and midwives, and conversely the health visitors were
encouraged to call on the practitioners to make themselves known and to
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