Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- PART I THE MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH AND THE LOCAL SANITARY AUTHORITY
- PART II NEWSHOLME AT THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD
- 7 Poverty, fitness, and the Poor Law
- 8 The Local Government Board and the nation's health policy
- 9 Launching a national tuberculosis program
- 10 The Great War and the public health enterprise
- 11 Infant and maternal mortality, interdepartmental conflict, and Newsholme supplanted
- PART III THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW: NEWSHOLME AS ELDER STATESMAN
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
9 - Launching a national tuberculosis program
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- PART I THE MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH AND THE LOCAL SANITARY AUTHORITY
- PART II NEWSHOLME AT THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD
- 7 Poverty, fitness, and the Poor Law
- 8 The Local Government Board and the nation's health policy
- 9 Launching a national tuberculosis program
- 10 The Great War and the public health enterprise
- 11 Infant and maternal mortality, interdepartmental conflict, and Newsholme supplanted
- PART III THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW: NEWSHOLME AS ELDER STATESMAN
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
NOTIFICATION AND ITS USES
At the top of Newsholme's agenda when he joined the Local Government Board was the launching of a national tuberculosis program. His experience in Brighton led him to envision a comprehensive strategy operating on national guidelines but organized and administered by local health authorities. Notification of cases to the Medical Officer of Health would be the starting point. He never thought of notification as a mere statistical or administrative exercise. It must be the beginning of constructive action by local authorities. While M.O.H. in Brighton, he held that towns should not initiate notification of tuberculosis until they were prepared to offer the patient whose case was notified “all possible help” in return. Once in Whitehall and after notification was compulsory, he continued to insist that the justification for notification was what followed.
It is only when the medical officer of health, the tuberculosis officer and the medical practitioner co-operate in securing the patient's welfare, by improving the conditions under which he lives and works, by measures of cleansing and disinfection, by safeguarding the health of the patient s family, and by a course of institutional treatment when this is indicated, that the possible utility of notification is realised.
We have seen in Chapter 6 that there had been some professional opposition to notification of tuberculosis and a widely held apprehension that compulsory notification would be followed by social and economic discrimination against the disease's victims.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885–1935 , pp. 239 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997