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CHAPTER 12
CONFLICT
Essentially a man of action, Hall was unab le to tolerate
indefinitely the apathy and indifference with which his efforts to
improve Public Health were usually met .
Moreover, he now felt
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sufficiently confident of his own position in the coremunity, as a private
medical practitioner, a man of science and learning , and the foremost
Catholic layman, to risk another conflict with those who supported, or
were supported by the 11status quo11 • Whatever the spark that actua lly
ignited the fire, at a meeting of the Royal Society on June 10 , 1857,
his patience snapped.
At the beginning of the meeting he interrupted
the Secretary, Dr J. Milligan, who was intent on carrying out the usual
business procedures , to demand that his Health Reports for the previous
four months , passed over at each meeting , take precedence, ''their subj ect
being one of vital importance to the community'' .
After lengthy debate
and argument , in which Hall was supported by Miller, the meeting was
finally given over to reading and discussing the reports .
It was the
beginning of another struggle, this time staged in the polite but no less
bitter language of the Royal Society.
In these reports, Hall referred especially to the amount of
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'ozone' in the atmosphere, as determined by his and Abbott 's observations;
possibly, he thought, the remarkab le difference between the average
mortality rate throughout the country districts (14 per 1000 - less than
one third that of Hobarton) and that of the city might be explained by
obtaining a series of ozonometrical obs ervations carefully registered in
different localities in the city and the country.
He offered to make
one set of observations at his own residence, now in Nile Terrace.
However, Mil ligan denied that such an explanation was possible, since the
mean for Melbourne in April was 4.5 on Schnbein 's scale as compared with
Hobarton 's 6.07.
Since the death rate in Melbourne was lower than in
Hobarton, the amount of ozone, which· was much greater in the latter city,