Deeds, not numbers
In my day job, I am the successor to the District Medical Officer referred to in this notice pinned to a wall in an early 1900s school at Beamish.
The list has expanded, though everything on the Beamish list is more or less still on the list today, though not always in quite the same way.
Consumption is, of course, better known now as TB, as notifiable now as it ever was.
Croup can be caused by many things, and isn’t notifiable in itself, but can be a symptom of diphtheria, which is certainly notifiable.
The dodgiest one is erysipelas, a skin infection. This can be caused by a Group A Streptococcus infection, and can be invasive, in which case it would be notifiable.
The first order for the national collation of notifiable disease data in England and Wales was made by the Local Government Board in 1910. The first statistics followed in 1911, though were pretty incomplete, so most data sets only report from 1912 onwards.
A list of notifiable diseases from the early 1900s might therefore seem a bit anachronistic for Beamish’s school—but local systems of notification like this vastly pre-date efforts to collate data on a national footprint. Notification of certain diseases to local medical officers became legally mandated in 1889, and existed in other forms for many years before that.
In the world of twenty-first century public health, my predecessors would be shocked to learn that it’s sometimes forgotten that notification enables (first and foremost) timely action in response to individual cases to protect the population. Compilation of those reports into statistics is an important secondary use—but not the primary aim.
