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12
Russell Square and Lincoln's Inn Fields. The localities which in 1861 held
an unusual position in respect of their aggregate mortality, were chiefly two:
(a) that of Coram Street, which gave in this year a quarter more deaths than
than usual, and(b) the parts to the north-east of Drury Lane where there
has ordinarily been a very high death-rate, but which had in 1861 only the
average mortality of St. Giles's as a whole.
Knowing that children under five years of age contribute so largely to
the whole mortality, we are prepared to expect, what appears on the following
table, that the localization of Infantile deaths is almost identical with that of
the deaths at all ages. Here for the first time are separated deaths among
infants under three months of age.

Here is to be remarked the astonishing fact that five young children die
in the poorer districts of St. Giles's to every one that dies in the better
localities of Bedford and Russell Squares. It is not too strong to say that
three at least out of every five of these deaths might be and ought to be
prevented. Yet this waste of infantile life is not exceptional in St. Giles's.
Every year has witnessed the same thing to about the same degree.
Discrepancy between the various districts is even more strongly marked
in the Zymotic diseases that have infested them. While Bedford Square
locality lost only one in a thousand of its residents from complaints of this
kind, three of the ten localities lost seven, and one of them, Church Lane, lost
approximately nine persons in the thousand from the same class of diseases.
Compared with the experience of former years, there is some peculiarity in
the distribution of this class of diseases in 1861. They were less fatal than
usual in the two sub-districts of St. Giles's parish which lie to the east of
Drury Lane. They were more fatal than usual in the Bloomsbury Square
and Church Lane localities, but especially in the neighbourhood of Coram
Street. In this last district a serious epidemic of scarlatina prevailed in 1861.
In the culs de sac leading off Little Coram Street, on the Foundling Estate,
this disease was three times more fatal than in the worst parts of St. Giles's.
Measles was most prevalent in Church Lane and its neighbourhood; whooping
cough in the Dudley Street locality. The epidemic of typhus fever found its
head-quarters about Short's Gardens and gave several fatal cases in all the
other localities, those in the north of Great Russell Street being less affected