Essays and Papers on Some Fallacies of Statistics Concerning Life and Death, Health and Disease; With Suggestions Towards an Improved System of Regist

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875. Excerpt: ... 263 APPENDIX A. REGISTBATION OF DISEASE. From the ' British Medical Journal, ' March 2nd, Wth, and 23rd, 1872. I.--Its Principles and Methods. The question of sickness returns, as contributions towards a national registration of disease, is now generally acknowledged to be intimately connected with that of improved sanitary administration, and not less so with that of an amended system of medical poor relief. All this was foreseen and urged by those who for many years have been engaged in promoting the establishment of a scientific and practically useful registration of sickness. But from time to time, in the progress of the question, some one or other energetic reformer has come forward to press the immediate, though partial and fragmentary, attainment of this object, without sufficient regard to its necessary connection with a normal medico-sanitary organization; and of lato a party has arisen which desires to centralize this measure, and to make it a mere affair of Poor Law medical officers and a Government board in the metropolis. It will bo easy to show how utterly opposed this centralizing plan is to the principles on which the leaders of this movement started fifteen years ago, and have steadily proceeded until the present time. Those principles were enunciated, though not for the first time, in 1860, by a special committee, 'On Registration and Sanitary Police, ' of the Social Science Association. The object of our veterans was to combine with a scientific superintendence of the registration of births and deaths, in each district or group of districts, a record of all sickness attended at the public expense. The method proposed in 1860 to effect this object, in the absence of a corps of superior health officers, was to substitute, as vacancies occur.