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1861.
ANNUAL REPORT
OF THE
Medical Officer of Health
SECTION L—On the Mortality of the Metropolis in 1861.
London, with a population of 2,803,939 at the census, lost 68,001 of its
inhabitants by death in the year 1861. The death-rate 23.18 per thousand
is somewhat higher than the average of the few past years. It is higher than
that of 1860 or 1859, lower than in 1858.
No one class of disease was specially remarkable for its fatality in London.
Zymotic diseases were below the average, though not nearly to the same
extent as in 1860. Small-pox, after the epidemic of 1859-60, showed a
striking decrease in deaths. Measles, scarlatina, and whooping-cough were
less fatal in 1861 than in the years immediately preceding. However, before
the end of the year, scarlatina resumed a distinctly epidemic character.
Diarrhoea, which had been surprisingly absent in the previous year, doubled
the number of its deaths in 1861, but still remained less fatal than in 1859.
Fever had, during several former years, shown a very gratifying decrease, but
in the latter half of 1861, it was unusually fatal and has since grown
into a serious epidemic of typhus, which, at the date of this Report,
(June, 1862), is still hanging over the metropolis. Of Consumptive disorders
and Diseases of the Lungs, the other causes of death that most vary from year
to year, it will be enough to say that their mortality has been high, but not
to an extraordinary degree. The same is true for the other two large classes
of Brain and Heart disease.
Of the five groups of districts into which London is divided by the
Registrar-General, the northern and central groups experienced, in 1861,
almost the whole of the rise in mortality. In the northern group of districts
the death-rate rose from 21.74 and 21.24 in the thousand, at which it had
stood in 1859 and 1860, to 22.30 per thousand in 1861. And in the central
group of districts, which comprehends St. Giles's, the death-rate of 25.04
per thousand in 1861, was higher than it has been in any of the five preceding
years, even higher than in the very unhealthy year 1858. (Appendix I )
The progress of fatal disease in London through the four quarters of the
year has been of course unequal, some disease s being more fatal in the cold than in
the warm months and the reverse. But besides the variations directly dependent
on season, the year 1861 has shown some other fluctuations in its quarterly
mortality, especially in the decline of measles and whooping-cough, and the
rise of scarlatina, typhus and other forms of continued fever. (Appendix IV.)
SECTION II.—On the aggregate mortality of St. Giles's in 1861.
Comparison with neighbouring districts.
Fourteen hundred and sixty-one persons belonging to St. Giles's district
died in 1861. Of these deaths, 1,385 were returned by the local registrars,
and 76 occurred in the hospitals of adjacent districts. (Appendix II.)
Of the 1,461 deaths, 755 were of males, 706 of females. Of the 76 deaths
in hospitals, 52 were of males.