Register Office [St. Martin’s]
Liverpool 1st March 1899
Dear Sir
May I ask you to use all possible influence with the Health Committee to use every effort to persuade the Local Government Board to allow the public vaccination station to be reopened. The Local Government Board seem to imagine that there are no exceptional circumstances specially applicable to Liverpool why such course should be adopted. I profess to know as much about the local condition of Liverpool as anyone in the city and I avow that there are social and local conditions in Liverpool not found in any other large Town. To enumerate these would be a matter too lenthy for this communication The principal point I desire to specify for your guidance is the fact that between the date of registration of Birth to the time allowed for vaccination a very large per centage of the people will have removed or may be readily imagined many of these people can carry all their belongings in their hands from one room to another So that when the Vaccination officer or the Public Vaccinater visits the address originally ^given^ the party cannot be found and very likely never will be found. Then since the amended Act came into operation. It became my duty as Registrar to issue a new form of requisition and I have in every case taken the trouble to impress upon the people the importance of reading this new form and complying with the requirements of the new act yet I am regularly pestered with people coming back to me wanting to know why the Vaccination Station is closed and seeking advice what they are to do.
This may be accounted for to some extent by the fact that out of 400 Births registered in [st. Martins] Sub District since 1st January 1899. 132 persons can neither read nor write so that the information on the requisition form is to those people practically useless However they generally do know that there was a public Vaccination Station to which they have generally brought their children clean and tidy to be vaccinated, and I may declare that the new system is and will be a failure and more expensive with diminished results.
It may perhaps interest you or your committee to know that out of the 400 Births registered as aforesaid I only found one objector to vaccination and that one could give me no substanted grounds for his objection
Please understand I am writing in the public interest and not in my official capacity but you can make what use you think of this letter
I am
Dear Sir
Yours truly
M McGuire
Registrar
The Medical Officer
Municipal Office
Liverpool
Glossary
Profess = claim
Avow = confess openly
Enumerate = mention things one by one
Registrar = a person responsible for keeping official records up to date
Requisition = an official order (people/ group with responsibility) claiming use to something. A requisition form details the items needed, for how long, etc.
Aforesaid = referring to something mentioned previously in the letter
Substanted = no reasonable grounds to object