NOTES ON A RECENT BLUE BOOK.
17
practice, and receives a most inadequate salary for his official
work, is by no means favourable to efficiency in the perfor-
mance of official duties, even when the qualifications of the
officer are of the highest kind. He thinks therefore that it would
be an advantage if two or more adjacent Rural Districts would
combine to secure the services of a Medical Officer bound to
devote his whole time to his official duties.
Among the concluding recommendations is one that "The
District Council should desist as soon as possible from
deliberately polluting streams and rivers by the discharge into
them of untreated sewage," etc. Then follows a list of places
at which sewage purification works should be provided. It is
evident that Dr. Fletcher's recommendation that a District
Medical Officer of Health should have both a much larger
salary and a more extensive area of work than at present would
be specially useful in this matter. For at present it is evident
that sanitary progress means simply that a village gets rid of an
accumulation of sewage by diverting it into the nearest stream.
And that when the medical officer has done his duty as regards
his own small district he tends to feel that those outside are no
concern of his, especially as his private practice necessarily
occupies by far the greater part of his time as decidedly the
only important source of income. But a medical officer,
devoting all his time and attention to a much larger area, would
not feel that his duty ended when his own immediate neighbour-
hood was freed from sewage accumulation ; but would
necessarily feel that his duty obliged him to prevent the
absurdity and injustice of benefiting certain villages by plans
involving gross injury toothers situated lower down the same
stream.
Essex naturalists may certainly claim to be among those
most interested in the removal of sewage from the Essex rivers,
sewage contamination being injurious not only to man and
domestic animals but to all the wilder creatures of the land, as
well as to the inhabitants of the water. And no result of the
proper disposal of sewage will be more generally valued than its
establishment of permanently satisfactory relations between man
and the oyster.