View report page

28
It is incumbent upon me to place on record my grateful
thanks to every member of my staff for the co-operation and
extra time they so enthusiastically gave towards the work
entailed in connection with the Health Week.
It is manifestly quite impossible to state precisely whether
or not an adequate return accrued. When, however, it is
remembered that no fewer than 35,000 people visited one or
other of the two separate exhibitions held at the Town Hall,
Stratford, and the Public Hall, Canning Town, respectively, it
must be inferred that an enormous interest in the Public Health
was stimulated. If only a small percentage of these 35,000
absorbed a little of the priceless information concerning their
wellbeing so lucidly demonstrated at the exhibitions the Health
Week was a success. Experience tends to show that lectures on
health matters should be supplemented by cinema pictures, and
care taken that the lecturers, who sometimes have only the
slightest knowledge of the class of neighbourhood from which
their audiences are drawn, do not put forth impracticable
suggestions. It is necessary to be very careful in order that
the Public Health Authority may not be exploited through its
Health Week to advertise firms whose claim in one way or
another that their goods are beneficial to health is either in
every respect baseless or based upon the flimsiest possible
evidence. I am strongly of opinion that the amount of trade
rivalry, which is so prevalent and often entirely dominates a
Health Exhibition with its babel, is quite out of place, and
tends very definitely to minimise the effect of the true purpose
for which the Exhibition is held.
While Health Weeks and Exhibitions are of great value, it
is questionable as to whether more than a year should not
elapse between these weeks of intense propaganda. I believe
that the best form of propaganda in health matters is to be
obtained through the public Press, by posters, and by steady,
persistent teaching of hygiene in the schools, in the Churches,
and in the homes and haunts of the people.