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In Finsbury all deaths from phthisis and all the deaths of
children under one year, received in the weekly returns of the
Registrar-General, are carefully investigated. Yet, even with
these limitations, many addresses of alleged Finsbury deaths are
received every year which cannot be verified on enquiry. These
faulty, misleading, or incomplete addresses, are nearly always
derived from poor law institutions, occasionally from hospitals.
Their investigation and the correspondence which follows their
reception waste a considerable amount of the time of the staff.
Much of this waste could be prevented if the addresses of the
patients were verified when they were received into the poor law
workhouses or infirmary. . However, owing to the establishment
of a Metropolitan Common Poor Law Fund, the settlement of a
patient which in former years used sometimes to be the subject
of an acrid legal dispute, is now almost immaterial from a poor
law standpoint. The poor law officers are now not so acutely
concerned. The occasions on which these incorrect poor law
addresses have been traced have been chiefly when the patients
still lived, and had been notified to the Public Health Department
as suffering from tuberculosis or from an infectious disease. To