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10
Consumption is not beginning when a patient goes to the
doctor and learns that one lung is slightly affected. The
disease is then firmly established. Consumption is beginning
in hundreds of young people who live in insanitary dwellings.
Practically every house in Kingston which has not been built
under the modern bye-laws, or has not been improved up to
the standard of those bye-laws, is insanitary. I should like to
be given the power to paint a large I in yellow paint on the
wall of every house where the landlord after due warning did
not bring his house up to the proper standard. Under present
conditions before a house can be improved it is necessary to
prove a nuisance, and as tenants who are not consumption
proof usually move from these insanitary houses before the
disease is well developed the proof is very difficult.
If the house is difficult to deal with, the place where the
child spends the rest of his time is more readily managed.
You have recently built some magnificent schools. Those
in Bonner Hill Road, standing as they do in an isolated
position, are especially open to the beneficent influences of
sunlight and fresh air. The new schools in the Richmond
Road would have been better from the health point of view
could room have been found to set them back to the building
line of the old schools, but both schools are hygienic buildings.
The St. Luke's Schools are less well arranged but with
fewer scholars would be fairly acceptable, and for a small
school St. Agatha's and All Saint's Infant's might pass. The
other schools cannot be considered as modern educational
buildings.
Now 15 out of the 52 deaths from consumption and
tuberculosis have occurred in young people under 15 years of
age. That is of school age, so that we may reckon a considerable
number of consumptives amongst our school children.
This number increases in proportion in the younger years of
adult life and increases largely because so little is done for
possible consumptives in childhood. One of the great
necessities of child life is milk, and under the Act for the
feeding of school children I hope arrangements may be made
to provide milk for the children in the infants' schools at the
morning break.
The indoor and outdoor relief of England and Wales cost
in 1903-4 £10,027,858 a year, and one-eleventh of this charge