Preventive medicine to the public health / by Alfred Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, Alfred.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Preventive medicine to the public health / by Alfred Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    had its recognised pilot in the Medical Officer of Health, whose duty it is to watch the indications afforded by registrations, and to advise the Local Authority accordingly. The indications are, how- ever, not afforded to that officer at the most im- portant and essential time—viz., at the very onset of epidemic or infectious disease. Registration of death is not in itself sufficient for the welfare of the State. The only information which a Medical Officer of Health receives officially at present is, that disease of an infectious character has been fatal in a given place some time previously. This information is conveyed to him many days or even weeks after the event, and he finds, on inquiry, that the materies morbi has already been spread far and wide, that the contagia which have been produced by that case have been passed into the public sewer, the nearest water-course, or other receptacle for human excreta, and, as a conse- quence, have most likely multiplied indefinitely. It is also probable that many cases of the same kind occurred before one was fatal, and that no efficient steps were taken to localise or circum- scribe the effects of the disease in that locality. It is more than probable that if the proper officer could have had information of the first appearance of that disease in the locality, the general distribu- tion of its contagious particles would have been prevented, and the people saved some of the conse- quences of that distribution. A natural sequence to the registration of death is the registration of