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58
Regulation Order of 1908, was sent to all the resident practitioners
in 1909. Apart from the Poor Law Medical Officers, who are under
an obligation to notify cases of Phthisis among their Poor Law patients,
only two notifications were received from private practitioners. The
minimum number of Phthisical patients here may be reckoned at 350,
and the total notifications received under the Order were 116.
Thirty-one of these were from the three District Medical Officers,
66 from the Infirmary, 5 from the Workhouse, and 6 from the Medical
Officers of other Unions.
Sixty-three of the notifications were for persons coming for the first
time under the notice of the medical officers, the remaining 53 were
notified previously some as many as six times.
On several occasions the consumptives gave wrong addresses when
taking their discharge from the Infirmary, and judging by the time
elapsing between notification and death in many instances, the Order
has been largely honoured in its breach as well as in its observance.
One notification arrived five days after, and six others one day before,
the death of the patients.
The class of persons dealt with by the Order may largely account for
this, as well as for the repeated notifications already referred to. Apart
from the friendly supervision exercised over the sufferers, and the
educational value of the visits to those in charge of them, the subsequent
disinfection of the premises must be of material use in checking
the spread of the disease.
Were notification of all cases of Consumption in force, I doubt if any
real good effects would follow, unless adequate hospital provision was
made for the treatment of early curable cases and for the isolation
of advanced incurable ones.
Among those whom I visited during the year was a man in the last
stages of Phthisis, whose expectoration was most copious and offensive,
and under the conditions of his existence no proper care was taken as to
its disposal.
He lived by day with his wife—who had a baby under a year old—
and the other members of his family in a common room, without
a window or door open, the air in the place being foetid and heated to
an unbearable degree.
The Health Visitor could effect no improvement by advice, and I was
not surprised.
Could one expect that a man "on the Parish," with wife and children
in need of the necessaries of life and devoid of every comfort except
that of a warm fire, would accept advice and appreciate the dangers run
by those around him ?
In September last, following the opening of the "Alfred Boyd
Memorial Sanatorium" at Little Baddow, an influential meeting of Essex
Citizens including representatives of Sanitary Authorities throughout