[Report 1950] / Medical Officer of Health, Skelton & Brotton U.D.C.

  • Skelton and Brotton (England). Urban District Council.
Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1950] / Medical Officer of Health, Skelton & Brotton U.D.C. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    TO THE CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS OF THE SKELTON & BROTTON URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL Madam and Gentlemen, I beg to submit my fourth Annual Report for the year 1950, the contents and arrangements of which are in accordance with the Ministry of Health’s Circular 2/50. It would be useful to enquire what has been the outstanding event in the District in 1950 within the sphere of the prevention of ill-health ; for Public Health, or Preventive Medicine, or Social Medicine to use a name which is to-day becoming fashionable in journals and universities, though it means neither more nor less than do the two older names, is the science that investigates the causes of health and the causes of deviations from health with a view to preventing members of the community departing from a state of health. This is an entirely different matter from treating and attempting to cure people who are already ill, which is the present function of family doctors and hospitals. In fact, the National Health Service Act, 1946, has thrown the limelight on hospitals, which, necessary though they are, should not be regarded as the culminating aim and final achievement of Medicine, for to prevent is financially more economical, ethically more humane, and socially more efficient than to cure. The emotional appeal of hospitals, not only to the public, which is quite understandable, but also to the medical profession, remains, however, great; public health does not awake from our unconscious minds primitive images of the powerful beneficent father-figure surgeon operating in the symbolic operating theatre, or of the mother-figure nurse in the shaded light of the ward bending in the night watches over the sufferer’s cot. Compared with these images, a health visitor (a State Registered Nurse with usually two additional qualifications) tramping from house to house inculcating the principles of healthy living is a vision of drabness so is the sanitary inspector viewing a leaking roof in the presence of an aggrieved tenant; so is the medical officer of health weighing the problem of a doubtful water supply, or carrying out investigations into the causes of some unhealthy condition of the inhabitants of his district, an investigation which may yield few positive results for years, or immunising a batch of children, a measure that produces a negative, namely an absence of diphtheria. Yet public health has achieved so much in the hundred years of its official existence. During the first five or six decades of that period it was occupied with environment in a narrow physical sense and with the epidemics which accompanied such an environment; it had no option because in the Victorian era environment for the bulk of the population was so bad that something had to be done about it before anything else could be attempted ; it was in fact so bad that even the privileged classes did not escape its effects, for the Prince