View report page

38
therefore, for 1865, the deaths having numbered 115, is
something less than 16 per 1000 living, or 1 per 1000 less
than is noted by the Registrar General as pertaining to
the most healthy of rural districts.
Zymotic Diseases and their resulting Deaths.—The 11
deaths from the seven principal epidemics that are enumerated
in the Registrar General's weekly returns is, in
an estimated population of 7500, a low rate of mortality
compared with that of most of the suburban localities, and
is, it is suggested, a very satisfactory indication of the
operation within the Sub-district of some good sanitary
influences.
To improved sewerage more is perhaps due than to any
other cause; for, without doubt, since good house drainage
has become the rule, and the use of the disease-engendering
cesspool the exception, the maladies comprehended
in the term "epidemic," have not only exhibited themselves
in a much less virulent form, but are wont now to prove
fatal, almost exclusively, amongst the ill-fed and the scrofulous,
instead of, as formerly, striking down the strong
and the weak, the rich and the poor indiscriminately.
Of the 16 cases of Zymotic disease that proved fatal in
the past year, more than one-half were registered as having
occurred to children of indigent parents, for the most part
with a scrofulous taint to be detected in their families,
and in localities where overcrowding, it is feared, will
ever operate to unduly swell the mortuary returns of this
parish.
With the increase of population amongst the affluent
and middle classes, the poor must necessarily, and in
obedience to a natural law, increase in proportion ; but
seeing that where there are annually erected scores of houses
of a superior order, scarcely one is built of a kind that can
be made available as a residence for the family of a
labouring man, little else can be expected than that overcrowding
will daily become more deplorable. It need
hardly be observed, also, that when once a poor and overpeopled
neighbourhood commences a downward course in
respect to its sanitary arrangements, there is, if it be left