800

in this country because the danger to life fromthe indiscriminate use of hydrogen cyanide is farfrom negligible. ____

LEEDS THEN AND NOWIN 1836, when the Municipal Corporations Act of

the previous year came into force, the members of theLeeds town council, elected for the first time bypopular vote, were mostly men with no experience ofmunicipal administration. In an earnest endeavourto learn what tasks lay before them-and possiblyappalled by the condition of the town-they did avery sensible thing and appointed a committee tomake a survey. This report, which appeared in theJournal of the Royal Statistical Society, has nowbeen reprinted with a foreword by Mr. CouncillorHawkyard, chairman of the mental health servicescommittee and Lord Mayor in 1930-31. As a pictureof town life early last century, with its commencementof the industrial era, and its rapid multiplying of thepopulation, it makes interesting reading, and showswhat enormous progress has been made in a relativelyshort space of time. Populous districts of the townwere wholly without sewers ; in rows of houses thecellar dwellings (of which there were over 500) wereseldom dry ; the conditions of the streets wereindescribable, many of them being recorded as-

" Deficient in sewerage, unpaved, full of holes, with deepchannels formed by the rain intersecting the roads andannoying the passengers ; some ill-lighted, and some withoutlamps ; with cellars sometimes so dangerously exposed thatpassengers are liable to frequent accidents ; and sometimesrendered untenable by the overflowing of sewers and othermore offensive drains ; with ash-holes, &c., exposed to publicview, and never emptied, or being wholly wanting, as isfrequently the case, the refuse is accumulated in cellars,thrown into the streets, or piled against the walls."

In addition, nearly one-half of them were weeklyso full of lines and linen as to be impassable for horsesand carriages, and almost for foot-passengers. Publicconveniences are " uncleansed because it is nobody’sbusiness," and as " everybody’s perquisite, theybecome offensive in the highest degree." It is a

picture which some modern critics of bureaucraticcontrol might well pause to consider. Overcrowdingwas rampant; instances are given of five to six personsin each bed-" and there are generally two or three."One conclusion was certain, " that the greater partof the town is in a most filthy condition, whichdemands an immediate remedy."

Actually very little was carried out for many years.The council made application to Parliament for

powers, the Leeds Improvement Act of 1842 beingthe result, but, Mr. Hawkyard concludes, " thecouncil evidently became alarmed at the cost of theproposal, for very little was done by way of improve-ment until the council appointed a medical officer ofhealth in 1866." Crime, religious accommodation,education, physical condition, occupational mortality,and the differential birth-rate all came under the eyeof this committee. Their statistics of the size of

family are of some interest. In 1925 the medicalofficer of health for Leeds drew attention in his l

annual report to the " disquieting significance " ofthe falling birth-rate, the fall, as is well known, not i

being equally distributed over all sections of the 1

community. " It is from the poor that the populationto an ever-increasing extent is deriving its recruits,"

{

he writes, " which means that the average fitness of E

the individual units is slowly but surely declining."Nearly a hundred years before his predecessors con- t

cluded that " thus it is evinced that the greatest tproportion of births takes place among the lowest (class ; next among those employed in outdoor handi-craft ; then among indoor handicraftsmen ; then

. among tradesmen ; and lastly among independent and, professional people." And this was before the-

popularisation of methods of contraception at whosedoor the differential birth-rate is so often entirely laid.Leeds is not to-day without its particular and urgent

problems, as perusal of its annual reports, andespecially of such sections as that on smoke abatement-will show. But in a little under one hundred years ithas, in common with all England and Wales, travelleda long way in the endeavour to supply the amenities.of life and the health essential to their enjoyment.

AN INDEX OF TOXIC DEGENERATION IN

POLYMORPHS

THAT in states of toxaemia, the cytoplasm of thepolymorphonuclear cells undergoes more or less.characteristic changes has long been recognised ; theywere carefully studied by Turck, and a description ofthem may be found in his " Vorlesungen uberklinische Haematologie " (1912). The changes consist.,mostly in irregularity of the cell outline, increase in,size and in basophilic tendency on the part of thecytoplasmic granules, and vacuolation. Variousattempts have been made to assess the value of these-changes in following the course of infective conditions,.and lately M. S. Kugel and Dr. N. RosenthaI,1 working-at the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, have investi-gated the use of the Schilling " haemogram

" and com-bined with observations on the degree of this toxicchange. To secure a numerical expression of the amountof change they made use of the " degenerative index,"obtained by dividing the number of polymorphashowing toxic change by the total number of thesecells counted ; the more severe the infection and the

greater the degree of toxaemia the higher the index;should be. For the identification of the toxic changesthey found Jenner-Giemsa stain the most suitable..They regard the degenerative index as useful in itself,,but its greatest value, they believe, is as a supplementto the haemogram. The latter gives information as to.the degree of maturity of the polymorphs and is someindex to the urgency of the call upon the bone-marrowfor their production. It gives, however, no informa-tion as to the nature of the call ; a " shift to the left "-

may be produced either by an acute infection or byhaemorrhage. Such information is supplied by thedegenerative index. ____

THE Murphy Oration of the American College ofSurgeons will this year be delivered by Sir WilliamWheeler, past president of the Royal College of

Surgeons in Ireland. The annual clinical congressat which it will be given opens at St. Louis on Oct. 17th.On leaving Dublin last week Sir William receivedpresentations from Mercers Hospital and the Ministry-of Pensions’ Hospital, and from the City of DublinNursing Institution, of which he is chairman.

Dr. G. C. Anderson, deputy medical secretary of theBritish Medical Association since 1919, has succeededo the post of medical secretary upon the retirement ofDr. Alfred Cox. Before joining the central staff ofjhe Association, Dr. Anderson had considerable experi-ence in general practice in Fifeshire, and was medicalsuperintendent of the Wemyss Memorial Hospital. As aitudent of the University of Edinburgh he distinguished-rims elf in several branches of athletics, and held the-cottish long-jump and hurdles championships. Duringthe late war he was surgeon specialist to the 69thxeneral Hospital in Egypt and in Palestine.

1 Amer. Jour. Med. Sci., 1932, clxxxiii.