View report page

10
to be low, lower in fact than in some of the districts we arc
accustomed to think more favorably situated. The proportion
is rather more than 1 to 7 of the whole number of deaths.
Consumption, on the other hand, has destroyed a number nearly
equal with the six diseases named in the note—1 to 8 of the
whole number of deaths.* So much of this fatal disease, which
destroys more lives in the Hamlet than any other, owes its
development to over-crowding and want of ventilation and
cleanliness, that while the Vestry are directing their atten'tion to
the prevention of other diseases by the means placed at their
disposal, such changes will be made in the fomenting causes of
consumption, that it is fair to suppose our future records will
show a reduction in the number of deaths.
Scarcely less valuable than the mortality returns have been
found to be, would be information of recent cases of acute and
contagious disease coming under treatment by those gentlemen
who are engaged in parochial or other public medical service.
The report of the occurrence of deaths in a street may be received
in time to create alarm, to be followed by examination and
exertion to rectify that which is contrary to a satisfactory
sanitary condition. But the evil will have become known too
late for those who have fallen victims. The registration of a
death from fever may be taken in itself as an announcement of
the existence on the spot of many current cases; some of them,
perhaps, equal in gravity with that which proved fatal, may be
added to the list of the dead,—so paying a debt which can
scarcely with strictness, at that time, be termed an inevitable
debt of nature. This source of information has been considered
by the Metropolitan Medical Officers of Health of sufficient
importance to induce them to collect and publish weekly for
their mutual information accounts of such diseases from each of
their respective districts. Five of these publications have already
been issued, and my own communications have only been withheld
until the arrangements consequent on the recent separation
of the Hamlet from the Stepney Union are completed.
* The proportions of the deaths in all London for the Quarter is about 1 to 6
of this kind of disease, and of Consumption 1 to 8½ .