View report page

6
These four cases point to morbid poisons arising
wherever many patients are brought together, and which
improved hospital management has already diminished,
and must be made still further to diminish.
Amongst the accidental deaths, those of children always
bear with them this obvious moral, that children are safe
whilst carefully watched, and no longer; for instance, a
boy of 3, fell from a window in Duke-street; a boy of 3
months, son of a domestic coachman, was " found dead,"
having been suffocated "accidentally when in bed with his
parents a boy of 2, died from burn whose clothes took fire
from lighted shavings in the street; and a girl of 2, was
scalded to death by "a bason of gruel which she pulled over
herself when sitting at table." Two newly-born infants
were found in Hyde-park, and one in Wilton-place.
Kitchen Residences. Brick-street, No. 12. A child
died in the kitchen of this house, and the certificate of
the cause of death sent in by the medical attendant was
worded thus:—
"Teething: foul air of drains into kitchen; 6 weeks:
hydrocephalus ostensibly."
This certificate states what is the naked truth in many
cases; that when hydrocephalus, or scrofula, or rickets,
is returned as the ostensible cause of a child's death,
these Greek words are but so many circumlocutions,
for bad air, damp, thin clothes, and half-filled stomachs.
The kitchen in question was, however, not offensive, but
wet from land springs. Our municipal rulers are spending
hundreds of thousands in throwing away the London
sewage, but the land is yet undrained, and will continue
so; whilst that sewage which would make a barren waste
into a fertile meadow is thrown away. Fresh butter
meanwhile (when it can be got) is 18d. or 20d per lb.
And the sellers of milk palliate their adulteration of it