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CHAPTER 13
HEALTH
REPORTS
In any society, if there is not recourse to wasteful violence ,
changes occur slowly and imperceptib ly.
social reformer needs patience and persistence .
More than anything else the
Both these two
attributes were displayed by Hall during the first few months of 1858 .
The fearful anxiety associated with the typhus fever epidemic had subsided ;
even the first keen bite of disappointment he had suffered in the Royal
Society was fading .
It was a time for consolidating his position whi lst
awaiting a new opportunity to strike again, perhaps with a change in
tactics .
Meanwhile, he concentrated on his Health Reports now prominently
displayed in the Daily News .
These reports, though neither fully valued
nor appreciated by the citizens , summar ized the results of many hours of
laborious observation and compilation by Abbott and Hall who worked
together voluntarily, in a spirit of unselfish dedication to the interests
of Public Health and Science, to establish the relationship between
climatic conditions and health .
Two factors predominated in their findings :
the colossally high
rate of infant mortality in Hobarton and the immense fluctuations in
barometric pressure and temperature which characterized the meteorological
phenomena.
Hal l natural ly linked the two together and allied them with a
third, the carelessness of man .
In his mortality statistics he found
that a rising barometer with a falling thermometer was invariably fo llowed
by an increase in deaths both of adults and chi ldren .
the February report :
He explained in
On the 21st (January) , between the 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. observations ,
the barometer fe ll .386, and between the 1 p.m. and sunset rose
.550 or more than half an inch . Thus , in less than twelve hours
the barometer varied twice to the opposite extremes about half an
inch . Th is difference of nearly a quarter of a ton of
atmospheric pressure upon the adult human body within so brief
a period must have a serious effect upon health .
The records ab ounded with similar wide fluctuations .