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THIRD ANNUAL REPORT
of THE
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen—In each of the Animal
Reports which I have had the honour of presenting to you,
I referred you to the Registrar's returns, as, with some qualifications,
the touchstones of the sanitary measures we had
been pursuing through the previous years. The judgment
on our proceedings which is pronounced by these returns is,
I believe, not to be impugned. For, whilst a vast number of
those cases of disease which are known to be excited by
morbific influences which our sanitary measures may destroy,
end in the recovery of the patients, and have therefore no
place in the tables of mortality which are laid before you,
yet there is, undoubtedly, so general a relation between
the numbers of recoveries and of deaths, that the absolute
sum of the latter may be not unfairly taken in our comparisons
as indicative, at least, of the proportions of the whole.
Thus, in dealing with these classes of disease, we shall rarely
be far wrong in making the diminished ratio of deaths, our
guide in estimating also the much larger amount of diminution
in the number of those cases in which recovery occurred.
These considerations will give a fairer and more cheering
aspect to the actual results recorded in the Registrar's return.