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8
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT
OF THE
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
To the Board of Works, Fulmam District.
Gentlemen,
It will be satisfactory to you to hear that in presenting this,
my Seventeenth Annual Report, I have the pleasure to assure
you of a continued progression for the better in our Sanitary
condition. Dispassionately taking a review of the improving
aspect of the Fulham District during the seventeen years your
Board's supervision has existed, and remembering the unfavourable
condition in which we were placed previously to and up to
the passing of the Metropolis Local Management Act, the most
candid observer and critic must admit that a wonderfulimprovement
has been achieved in all that pertains to the preservation of
the public health. Not that I think all has been done which the
advance in Sanitary Science has shown to be practicable, or even
what the spirit of our prevailing sanitary legislation has contemplated
and considered necessary to perfection, in the health
preserving management of large communities. Whilst availing
ourselves of the general bounties of Providence, we must not forget
that in the history of man no such congregations of human
beings for permanent residence have ever come together as we
see at the present time, and that never since the epoch of our
first parents did a greater responsibility rest on those who hold
the reins of government than prevails at this very moment.
Your Board, of somewhat forty members, have, for instance,
the weal of nearly seventy thousand inhabitants in your hands;
and the most indifferent amongst us cannot look on this responsibility
with levity or carelessness. Disease, epedemic, or otherwise,
may strike us individually with grief beyond description,
and then we personally feel the power of the blow inflicted. In
your public duties you have to, or at least ought to, carry all
these influences into every action in your corporate capacity. To
bring home indeed the wants of the great body of your neighbours
to your own social requirements, and, judging by this standard,
to act fearlessly and independently for the public good. It
would ill become me as one of your officers to declare how little
in this respect has been accomplished by your Board, but it does
lie within my power and my province to declare at any rate how