[Report 1920] / Medical Officer of Health, Devon County Council.

  • Devon (England). County Council.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1920] / Medical Officer of Health, Devon County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the general practitioners, and thereby getting hold of the early cases and their contacts, but we are still in much need of more accommodation for children and for advanced cases, and the services of highly trained health visitors for preventive work. As the products of the war are passing away, it is to be hoped that Hawkmoor will soon be able to resume its proper function as a “ sanatorium/' whose primary objects should be education and curative treatment of early cases by auto-inoculation, and cease to be in a measure a mere Tuberculosis Home. The subject of “After Care/’so important in this disease is a very difficult matter as it is so intimately connected with finance. Maternity and Child Welfare has received a good deal of attention during the year, and still requires much more intensive work, for it is hardly too much to say that the health of the mother and child is the basis of the health of the community, for here is the source of the nation ; the question of their health should therefore stand first in the minds of all health authorities. The infant mortality rate has fallen in England and Wales from 156 per 1,000 in 1896-1900 to the figure of 80 in 1920. That for Devon has fallen to 50.9 per 1,000, the lowest on record. In 1919 the county infant mortality rate for legitimate births was the lowest in all the South Western Counties, and the 9th lowest of all the 61 Administrative Counties. Perhaps some credit of this is due to the work of the 20 Health Visitors in their home visiting and at the maternity centres, under the skilled guidance of Miss Booker, the chief Health Visitor. It is to be regretted that economy should have been fixed on the limitation of the number of these valuable officials, for I feel sure that still greater improvement would have taken place both in regard to infants and school children had their number been increased by fifty per cent. Unfortunately, maternal mortality shows little tendency to decrease in England and Wales : it was 4.8 per 1,000 births twenty years ago, and it has only fallen to 4.3 for 1920. It is a sad reflection on preventive medicine that we in this county should lose about 30 mothers each year during a purely physiological function. This also means there must be an unknown quantity of crippling effects