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words, as has been pointed out in previous reports, the death rate began
dropping away prior to and at an increased acceleration to that of the
notification rate.
It now seems from a further analysis of the figures that there is a
large difference here between males and females, and this difference is
shown up well in table 11, which, in order to smooth out minor variations
from year to year, is compounded of, in the main, four-year groups.

This table shows that, both for notifications and for deaths, the ratio
of male to female has always been over unity. The ratio for notifications
has remained remarkably constant from the time (1927) when it was first
recorded in the annual reports and this has continued right up to and
including 1957. With regard to deaths however the story has been very
different over the last hundred years and particularly over the last few
years. Our own records of the differences between the sexes are (as with
notifications) complete from 1927 onwards with the exception of the
years 1939-1946, but with the deaths we also have three earlier years,
1913-15. In all the groupings of the years the male to female mortality
has been over unity and until the beginning of the last war the ratio was
much the same as with notifications. Since 1947 however the ratio of
male to female deaths has much increased ; in other words females are
dying much less frequently than males from respiratory tuberculosis.
Compared with a ratio before the war of about 1.2, the ratio for the four
years after the war (1947-50) was 1.6, for the next four years 2.2. and for
the last three years 2.4. This remarkable difference between the sexes is
not of course confined to Lewisham, and national figures and the figures
of the big towns also show it, though not always to the same extent.