GAOL.

The health of the prisoners during the year has been as good as we would expect from the excellence of the site and other sanitary conditions. The history of the Gaol affords a good illustration of the effects of modern hygiene, or preventive medicine. Before a proper system of ventilation and drainage was adopted, diarrhoea and dysentery were endemic in the Gaol; and in the summer of 1866, when overcrowding was super-added to those fruitful causes of disease, dysentery became epidemic, and threatened the lives of many of the inmates. Since then only two cases of dysentery have occurred in the Gaol, and these were comparatively mild, and yielded at once to treatment. The prevailing diseases are, as usual, rheumatism and catarrh, but these diseases have been much less numerous than heretofore, owing to improvements in the mode of ventilation, which does not allow so much of draughts. They might, however, be still more diminished by the introduction of some system of heating, as that by hot air or hot water; and by allowing the use of flannel drawers to the prisoners in winter, which is at present against the prison regulations. The dry earth or earth closet system has been adopted in its simplest form at the Gaol, and Mr. Cleary tells me it is quite a success.

PUBLIC HEALTH.

In my annual reports for the last four years, I have endeavoured to elucidate the nature of the diseases, especially that of fever prevailing in the Colony, and, by pointing out their causes, to act the part of Health Officer, in showing the public how they may be prevented. In my report for the year 1865–66, I referred to the doubt which, it appeared from the report of the late Dr. Cusack, of the Nelson Hospital (the most eminent surgeon who has yet practised in New Zealand), exists amongst the members of the medical profession in the Colony in regard to the type of fever which prevails here; and as I had the largest field for observation, I promised to do all in my power to throw light upon the subject. I think I have established beyond a doubt that the prevalent diseases, viz., Fever, Dysentery, and Neuralgic Rheumatism, are endemic, that is, arise from malaria or paludal emanations. I have shown the type of fever to be typhoid, so common in England, and that we have no typhus or infectious fever in New Zealand—a fever generated and propagated by poverty, filth, and over-crowding. In 1866–67, I reported eight cases, which I ventured to call yellow fever, supposed by most people—even by members of the profession—to be peculiar to tropical climates. I called it yellow fever, because it presented the characteristic symptoms of the worst form of yellow fever, as it occurs in the tropics, viz., jaundice, haemorrhages from the mouth, nose, and ears, black vomit, and death about the sixth day in convulsions. I have found from my reading since, that modern pathologists do not consider yellow fever a specific disease, but merely the maximum of gastric or typhoid fever. I am not aware that a case of yellow fever has occurred in any other part of the Colony; but I have seen, from the report of one of the surgeons of District Hospitals on the Coast, a case reported as malignant jaundice, which I have no doubt was a case of the fever in question. The causes of the disease—excessive moisture, swampy grounds, absence of cultivation and drainage, and a bush resembling the jungles of the tropics—exist in greater abundance here than in any other part of New Zealand. I may mention that the exciting cause, in most of the cases of yellow fever which occurred here, was a fit of intemperance; and this may be useful to practitioners, as one of the first symptoms of the fever is jaundice, it is very liable, from the history of the case, to be treated for inflammation of the liver. In my last report, I attributed the decrease of fever and other malarial diseases chiefly to the population having become acclimatised, and the circumstance that the disease has this year occurred chiefly among new-comers, affords another proof of the malarial origin of the disease. It appears that a fever, called bilious or remittent, having all the characteristics of yellow fever, and now generally believed to have been yellow fever, modified by climate, was prevalent in Great Britain and the Continent of Europe about forty years ago; but since drainage, and the reclamation of swamps, and the construction of proper roads, this disease has entirely disappeared.

No case of infectious disease has to my knowledge occurred in the town or district, but four out of the eight cases of typhoid fever treated in the Hospital came from Hokitika.

I think it probable we will have a visit, if we have not yet been visited (two cases have been reported in New Zealand, but I think both doubtful), from that most loathsome and fatal disease—small-pox, now visiting Victoria for the second time. The preventive of this disease is vaccination, but as the protective effects of vaccination die out after a certain time—from five to twelve years, I would advise everyone to be re-vaccinated.