[Report 1908] / Medical Officer of Health, Warwickshire County Council.

  • Warwickshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

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

Credit: [Report 1908] / Medical Officer of Health, Warwickshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Office of the County Medical Officer of Health, 14, Temple Street, Birmingham, June 3rd, 1909. To The Warwickshire County Council. Mr. Chairman, My Lords and Gentlemen, 1. I have the honour to present my tenth Annual Report as County Medical Officer of Health, and the twentieth I have made to your Council on the health of the Administrative County. 2. I propose to adopt the same system as in my last Reports, namely, to deal with the County as a whole, and then complete the Report by summarising those of the District Medical Officers of Health. In the statistics, the birth, death, and Zymotic death-rates are calculated per 1,000 persons estimated to be living, while the infant mortality is reckoned on the number of children who died under one year of age per 1,000 registered births. THE COUNTY AS A WHOLE. AREA. 3. Owing to the fact that no change occurred in the boundaries of any of the Districts, or the County boundaries, the area remains the same as last year. The figures in acres for the County are, Urban districts 54,777, Rural districts 495,735, giving a total for the County of 550,512 acres. POPULATION. 4. Adopting the estimates of the District Medical Officers of Health the population calculated to the middle of 1908, appears to be 400,821, an increase of 6,737, an increase rather above that recorded in the previous year. As, however, we are now eight years from the last census it is obvious that in many instances the estimated population is liable to considerable error. In fact, I have no doubt whatever that the figure as stated is rather too high. For reasons given by Mr. May in his report on the Borough of Aston Manor, he shows the population to have little power of further increase, owing to the fact that practically the whole of the district is built upon, but as the Registrar General in his weekly and other returns calculates the population on what may be termed the average rate of increase, as found between the two last census enumerations, and takes no regard of the peculiar local conditions, I believe that the population in this Borough alone, as does the local Medical Officer of Health, to be stated at 2,000 or 3,000 more than it actually should be. As in past years, the chief increases in the population of the Urban districts are to be found in Erdington, Rugby and Sutton Coldfield; though in Nuneaton the population is believed to have shown also a fair increase. In the Rural Districts there is no marked estimated increase, though slight increases are shown in most of the so-called Rural Districts where Urban conditions prevail. BIRTHS. 5. Ten thousand three hundred and eight births were registered, compared with 9,847 in 1907, and 9,998 in 1906. Calculated on the estimated population, the birth-rate is found to be 25'7, compared with 25-08 in 1907 and 25 7 (the same figure) in 1906. The birth-rate for the whole of England and Wales was 26-5. 6. I am very pleased to be able to record an increase in the birth-rate compared with 1907, which was the lowest on record.