The Surveillance of Communicable Diseases of National Importance

Abstract

IN the introduction to his comprehensive report on the cholera epidemic of 1848–49, William Farr,1 that greatest of statistical epidemiologists, wrote, "If a foreign army had landed on the coast of England, seized all the seaports,. . . ravaged the population through the summer and. . . in the year it held possession of the country slain fifty-three thousand two hundred and ninety-three men, women and children,. . . the task of registering the dead would be inexpressibly painful; and the pain is not greatly diminished by the circumstance that in the calamity to be described the minister of destruction . . .