Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year ending December 31st, 1896.

  • Holborn (London, England). Board of Works.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year ending December 31st, 1896. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    5 Norfolk Street, Strand, W.C. (by telegram or otherwise), and leave a Medical Certificate (or a copy of the Notification Certificate) for the ambulance nurse, the Holborn Board will pay 1s. 6d. extra fee. The Board, after many ineffectual attempts to obtain suitable premises for a shelter or house accommodation for the use of persons who have been compelled to leave their dwellings for the purpose of enabling such dwellings to be disinfected, has again made arrange ments with the Vestry of Clerkenwell for the conjoint use of the Shelter at 47, Northampton Road. From March 25th to the end of the year this was used by 16 families from the District. Permission was given for a bacteriological examination of doubtful cases of Diphtheria to be made by the British Institute of Preventive Medicine, at the expense of the Board. Culture outfits were obtained, and during the last six months of the year 17 doubtful cases were examined. A set of post-mortem instruments has been provided for the use of the medical practitioners who make post-mortems in the room adjoining the mortuary. Five additional shells have also been provided. The Board's contract, dating from the 25th March, 1896, provided for the removal of house refuse at least once a week. This has not been strictly carried out, for as many as 1,361 notices for the removal of dust were received, an improvement, however, on the preceding year, when there were 2,114 such notices. Since the new contract, this year, the Contractor has appointed a special foreman to superintend this branch of the work, and I am glad to be able to say that the number of notices now received for the removal of house refuse is comparatively few. The corrected death-rate from all causes, and also that from phthisis continue to be higher than the rates for London. Statistics of the London Districts have shown that these rates increase with an increase of the conditions that are expressed by the word overcrowding. n the insanitary area between Leather Lane and the Gray's Inn Road that I specially reported upon to the Board last year, the death rate was excessively high, namely 47.8 per 1,000, also the phthisis