[Report 1948] / Medical Officer of Health, Dundee City.

  • Dundee (Scotland). City Council.
Date:
1948
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1948] / Medical Officer of Health, Dundee City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/184 (page 5)
    Annual Report—1948 The Lord Provost, Magistrates and Town Councillors of the City of Dundee. Ladies and Gentlemen, A public health service has existed in this country for exactly one hundred years. It developed in a somewhat haphazard way, very slowly during the first fifty years, but by leaps and bounds since the start of the present century. Progress in the application of preventive measures by official bodies did not by any means keep pace with the growth of knowledge. The introduction of new preventive measures depended very often on the success of enthu- siasts in some field or other in stimulating public opinion. This may explain why the organisation did not develop slowly but steadily to the level of efficiency necessary to safeguard the health of the people and why overhaul of the administrative machine was neces- sary from time to time. Two such overhauls resulting in tremen- dous changes have taken place during the last 20 years. The first resulted in the Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1929, which came into operation in 1930, and the second in the National Health Service (Scotland) Act, 1947, which came into operation in 1948. The former Act did not widen the services to any extent but oblite- rated large numbers of local bodies, including education authorities, parish councils and local boards of control, the functions of these defunct bodies being distributed among the surviving town councils and county councils. The 1948 Act, on the other hand, set out to provide a complete health service, and to do so created many new bodies and distributed a multitude of functions, old and new, among the existing and the newly constituted authorities. So far as Dundee is concerned, the Town Council had trans- ferred to it in 1930 Maryfield Hospital, Westgreen Mental Hospital, the school health service and the medical care of the outdoor poor. In 1948, the Town Council lost the two hospitals transferred to it in 1930 and also King’s Cross Hospital, King’s Cross Hospital West, Ashludie Sanatorium, the tuberculosis dispensary and the venereal