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fostering and reproductive. While public health may be
entitled to feel complacent if such an enquiry were directed at
it, no one knows better that further economy is still possible,
and while the mechanism is more often than not social rather
than purely medical, that does not seem to justify leaving it
entirely in other hands. Apart from the reduction in the
general wastage of life outlined above, there are special
examples where there is a particular need for attention, e.g.,
the high infant mortality of illegitimacy and the loss through
abortion.
Abortion is a complete wastage of fertility. As a reduction
of fertility itself is in some places suspected of being one cause
of the decreasing birth rate some remedy must be found for
this fruitless misdirection of reproduction, as a first step in
any attempt to secure an increase in the births.
A reduction of illegitimacy will only indirectly raise the
legitimate birth rate in so far as the potential can be diverted
by social measures into securer channels; more important and
far reaching will be its effect on the quality of the population,
but better provision for the care of the illegitimate infant wall
attack the infant mortality rate at its most vulnerable point.
Lest this public health prospectus encourages even the prudent
to relaxation and complacency, it is a matter of regret
that it is prophesied that even these measures when they are
practically applied will not be sufficient to reverse the population
trend without a very substantial and permanent change in the
reproduction rate, and so seriously is it regarded in one
Scandinavian country at least, that an active legislative policy
has been adopted in an attempt to effect this correction.
How far social legislation of this sort is capable of influencing
population trends is a matter for speculation. Fortunately
our part is much simpler, it is to secure the highest
survival rate possible, with the highest possible quality of
survivor.
There are no very significant epidemicalogical events to
record for the year. Measles with 760 cases assumed perhaps
almost epidemic proportions, but as is later recorded, the disease
generally was mild and there were no deaths. There were 114
cases of Scarlet Fever and 77 cases of Whooping Cough; both
figures can be considered as average low annual figures. There
were 139 new cases of T.B. added to the register and 45 deaths
from this disease; those are also average annual figures. There
are only 8 recorded cases of Dysentery but there is evidence
that mild intestinal infections have been much more widespread
than the number of notifications of such disturbances or
Dysentery would suggest. It is fervently to be hoped that we
shall speedily get back to pre-war standards of hygiene as
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