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improvement which could not be missed, provided the Pub lic ws
knowledgeable and responsible enough to elect those persons best suited
to legislate on its behalf. But , as many informed people knew , the gap
between the reality of the moment and the desi'red standard was wide
indeed, and needed much effort to bridge, as evinced' in a letter to the
Daily News from a correspondent in northern Tamania on June 30.
According to this writer, the situation in medicine in 1856 was chaotic,
requiring the immedate establishment of new laws for its practice, and
for sanitary rules and regulations throughout the co.lony. Under the
present Medical Practitioners• Act, there was no real protection to the
Public or to the Medical Profession against uneducated quacks and
imposters , against the sale of unadulterated drugs and medicines, against
the indiscriminate sale of harmful so-called upatentsu :
as far as
sanitary laws were concerned, there were none to guard against the
introduction and spread of conagious disease.
As it was, the Pub lic
was being deceived by false documents proving medical skill;
the Medical
Profession itself was apathetic and internally uncooperative, and there
existed no body, such as the Victorian Medical Society , to present its
just claims .
To remedy this appalling situation, the writer made many
su.ggestions for new legislation, amongst which were a new Medical
Practitioners' Act, the revision of the Coroners ' Act, laws for the
preservation of Public Health and modifications to the present Vaccination
Act.
The Daily News b.egan its educational programme on July 3 with
an introductory editorial on Public Health in which it sought to disprove
the argument that
What is· everybody's business is nobody1s business .
On the grounds of humanity, self-preservation , community welfare , and
financial stability, Pub lic Health was very much everybody 's business ,
but it was almost universally neglected both by the Government and the
Public, due to a kind of fatalism prevailing in the community.
Now and then we may have a few ardent individuals - the
medical practitioners here , as everywhere else, leading
the van - perseveringly drawing pub lic attention to the
yast extent of remediable and preventab le disease and
mortality inflicted upon us by neglect of the most simple
laws of hygiene. But we are utterly devoid of any
scientific or comprehensive measures adopted by
legislative enactment, or carried out by executive
enforcement.
The Public wrongfully blamed private neglect of the laws of health for
the prevalence of disease, and were unwilling to allow meddling