Annual report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1898.

  • Hammersmith (London, England). Parish. Vestry.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Annual report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1898. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    11 ask Her Majesty's Government to bring in a Bill for the notification of the disease. Everyone in the present day approves of and realizes the great advantage of the action which was subsequently taken, but society did not then seem to be roused at the state of affairs. In the present day with such a mortality from smallpox, every newspaper in the kingdom would be calling attention to the matter. I remember a medical man making a formal complaint against me to the Magistrate at the Hammersmith Police Court because I had removed a patient to an isolation hospital when suffering from smallpox, and had disinfected the infected room. No medical man could be found in the present day to disapprove of such a course. During last year there was only one death from smallpox in London. Future generations will look back to the statistics of the year 1898 and hardly believe it possible that 3069 deaths from measles should have occurred in the greatest and richest city in the world, with practically no effort being made by the Public Health Authorities to combat with the evil. Everyone knows that the illnesses in the greater majority of cases of measles are not of a serious character, but the whole question is, is it not an imperative duty that the disease should be made notifiable in order that premises might be disinfected, and as far as possible the disease prevented from spreading? SCARLET FEVER. Four hundred and fifty-eight cases were reported as due to scarlet fever, against 399 in the previous year, Two hundred and eighty-four cases reported last year were isolated at Isolation Hospitals, 281 at the Metropolitan Asylums Board's Western Fever Hospital, and 3 at the London Fever Hospital at Islington; 174 cases were treated at the homes of the patients. The mortality rate on the cases reported was 4.6 per cent.
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