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advised the Council to exterminate the thousands of useless , mischievous
unregistered dogs \>lhich roamed about the streets causing suffering and
annoyance;
whilst registered dogs were to be chained for fifty to sixty
days and carefully \'latched.
The Council 's Health Commit tee immediately
held an inquiry after which it pub lished the evidence in all its
distressing details in the press to app ease the Public's curiosity and
to prevent any misrepresentation of the facts.
However, there were some
people who refused to believe that hydrophobia had occurred in Hobart Town .
Indeed, their conviction that a wrong diagnosis had been made was
encouraged and strengthened by Crowther 's pub lic declaration that it \vas
not hydrophobia but a case of traumatic tetanus .
Since Crowther had not
examined the boy himself, feelings and tempers , especially amongst the
medical fraternity, ran very high.
Smart and Hall, particularly,
suffered suspicion and ridicule which Smart indignantly endeavoured to
counteract by forwarding a comp lete account of the whole affair to the
Australian Medical Journal . 4 Luckily, there were no other cases :
though singularly distressing, the incident did not result in the
appointment of a Health Officer, however desirable it was .
From 1867 to 1875 Hall persisted with his Health Reports ,
occasionally contributing other small articles on statistics, climate and
health as well to the press .
In England, his work did not pass entirely
unnoticed - in 1869 the President of the Royal Co llege of Phys icians of
London honoured him as a medico-vi tal statistician by soliciting his views
on the nomenclature of diseases preparatory to its pub lication by the
College. 5 More significantly in 1872 he used the data collected for his
r.eports over a period of fifteen years to join with Abbott in the
compiling of their last, most ambitious , and most important work on
meteorology and medico-vital statistics . This major publication, which
was printed by the Tasmanian Government for the Royal Society, comprised
two sections :
the first part 'by Abbott was , in the words of its lengthy
tile, The Results of Five Years ' Meteorologi cal Observations for Hobart
To\n with which were inco!Porated the results of Twenty-Five Years '
Observations previously published by the Royal Societx of Tasmania and
compl eting a period of thirty years . In his introduction, Abbott pointed
out that the results already published terminated in 1865;
as further
5
Mercury, March 27, 1867.
A.M.J., June, 1867, pp. 166-182.
E. S. Hall, '1Climate and Vital Statistics of Tasmania'1 The Results of
Five Years ' Meteorological Observations for Hobart Town, (Hobart
Town, 187.2) , p. 14.