Richson, Charles — Medical Officer of Health report, 1854

The annual report of a Medical Officer of Health. From 1848 every British local authority was required to appoint one and to publish what he found, and the reports are the result: births and deaths parish by parish, outbreaks of diphtheria and typhoid traced to a particular well or dairy, the state of the housing, the drains, the slaughterhouses and the school children. They were written for councillors rather than for posterity, which is exactly why they are so useful now — they record what was actually happening in a place, year by year, in plain administrative prose. This is the report of Richson, Charles for 1854. "The observance of the sanitary laws, divinely appointed, in the Old Testamnet scriptures, sufficient to ward off preventable diseases from Christians as well as Israelites" -- head of title page Digitised by the Wellcome Library as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library. The scan has no title page, which is why the catalogue supplies the title in brackets.