[Report 1911] / Medical Officer of Health, Derby County Borough.

  • Derby (England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1911] / Medical Officer of Health, Derby County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/132
    Public Health Department, Ford SStreet, Derby, April, TO THE (£f;airman au6 Jllembers of tl;)e Sanitarg cEoiniiiittec of {\]t Countj) Borough of Derbj). Gentlemen, I beg to submit my Fourth Annual Report on the Sanitary Condition of your Borough during the year 1911, this being the 35th Annual Report of your Medical Officer of Health. The vital statistics for the year are not nearly so favourable as those for the year 1910. The dry, hot summer was to a great extent responsible for the comparatively large number of deaths from Infantile Diarrhoea, while in the cold, wet summer of 1910 the deaths from this disorder were few in number. An epidemic of Measles during the early part of the year also tended to swell the mortality figures. This infectious disease is, unfortunately, only to limited extent amenable to general sanitation; some diminution may be expected from careful supervision of school attendances on the one hand, and from greater care on the part of the parents on the other; the latter are still too prone to consider the disease of a trifling nature, and the fatalistic and erroneous idea that every child must necessarily have the disease dies hard. It is satisfactory to report the continued interest taken by the mothers in our Welcome.” I consider that this is doing very admirable work at a very small cost. Perhaps the most important event in the year from a sanitary standpoint was the opening of a pavilion on the site adjoining the Infectious Diseases Hospital for the treatment of selected cases of Phthisis. This is, one hopes, only the beginning of a more com- prehensive scheme for dealing with this, the most important of our ])reventable diseases.
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