[Report 1893] / Medical Officer of Health, Huddersfield County Borough.

  • Huddersfield (England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Report 1893] / Medical Officer of Health, Huddersfield County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    4/114 (page 4)
    dependence upon the opinions of individual Medical men as to the disease which caused death. Thus in the classification of deaths for 1893, we find in 55 cases the cause described as “ ill defined ” or “not specified,” and hence the inclusion amongst this class of several cases of Enteric Fever probably over looked, would invalidate the death-rate from that disease but the gross death-rate would be unaffected so that the margin of possible fallacy is minimised as regards the gross death-rate. To display more clearly the statistics at my command, I have completed two Tables, presented before you some years ago and now compiled to embrace a period of 28 years, which for purposes of comparison is grouped into several smaller periods. The first Table exhibits the death-rates from the year 1865 up to 1893. The reason why these smaller periods have been selected will be found in the third column, while the improvement expressed in per centages will be found in the fifth and sixth columns. The fifth column embraces the improvement upon the previous period, while the sixth gives the improvement at each period upon the death-rate before the incorporation of the Borough. Disease and death, paradoxical as it may sound, are the measure of public health, and the latter bears a close propor¬ tion to the former. The table therefore is highly instructive and well worthy of careful and attentive study. The result in the saving of mortality is an emphatic witness to the value of sanitary measures and municipal government, and the figures teach the lesson that the death-rate is under our own control to an enormous extent, by attention to the principles of Hygiene, and further, that the waste of life in former years was wholly unnecessary. Unfortunately whilst we are ready to admit the desirability of sanitary improvements for the preservation of life we are very averse to pay for them, and, happily for all, we cannot neglect the health of others without to some extent endangering our own. Every step in sanitation means expenditure in money, and we must recollect that so long as there is so much preventible disease, (I do not mean purely infectious), we must not delude ourselves that we have reached the end of our sanitary measures.