A man who began to show shell-shock symptoms was best given a few days' rest by his local medical officer.

Local medical officers were usually committed to a purely professional radicalism, transfixed with the reduction of their magic figures, the disease and death rates, in local sanitary areas.

Some ten percent of the houses in Boundary Street had subterranean corridors in 1883, which the local medical officer regarded as one of the most alarming architectural phenomena of the Old Nichol housing stock.

Morant and Newman hoped gradually to develop a comprehensive free health service for children administered by local Medical Officers of Health, seeing this as the first step towards a free health service for all.

Dr. Murray McQuigge, the local medical officer, has charged that the local water company knew on May 18 that the water was potentially contaminated but maintained through May 21 that it was safe.

Many of the medical supporters of the legislation had a history of involvement in hospital and sanitary work among the poor, as local medical officers and poor law doctors - work which reinforced their commitment to the acts as part of the wider politics of public health.

Scientists like Dr John Ballantyre, Assistant Physician to the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, together with progressive local medical officers like Newman and Newsholme, insisted that recent research into pregnancy and embryonic pathology pointed to new methods of tackling the high infant death-rate.