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7
To recapitulate then, fevers were less prevalent, small-pox and diarrhœa
more prevalent in St. Giles' than in an equal population taken indiscriminately
from London at large. The balance of mortality from the group of
miasmatic diseases was on the side favorable to St. Giles'.
Consumptive or Tuberculous Diseases followed their invariable rule in
being extraordinary fatal in St. Giles's District. The deaths from such
diseases were 266 against a population-quota of 207. When one year is taken
with another this is about the ordinary degree of excess that is observed in
our parishes.
Heart and Brain Diseases also exhibited their usual excess of mortality,
Physical and mental work at high presure, with the frequent abuse of alcoholic
stimulants, are the causes to which such mortality is mainly to be ascribed,
and there can be no doubt that these causes operate especially upon the
residents of such a district as our own. Infantile convulsions too, which are
included in the class of Brain Diseases, depend upon causes that must ever
be most rife in a poor and ignorant population.
Diseases of the Lungs again, that large group that contributes every year
a sixth part of the entire mortality of London, habitually exhibits a larger
proportional mortality in St. Giles'. In 1863, our population would have
given 214 deaths from these diseases at the rate of mortality prevailing in the
town at large. The actual deaths were just half as many again, 322. Exposure
and poverty do the work of death with particular certainty through
this class of diseases, and public sanitary measures are in the main unable to
afford safeguards against their attacks.
Under the fourth class of the foregoing table, the excessive mortality
among children from the causes reckoned by the Registrar General as developmental
has been less apparent than usual in St. Giles's. Taking together
premature birth, malformations, teething, and atrophy in children, 100 infants
died in lieu of the population-quota of 90. The excess has generally been
double to this.
In the class of accidental deaths, the only point to be noted under the
present division of our subject is, that homicide as well as accident unhappily
adds to the mortality of St. Giles' in a distinguishing degree.
SECTION IV.—On the Localization of Disease and Death in
St. Giles's in 1863.
A. In Sub-Districts. Referring to each sub-district those persons
who were taken from it for treatment in hospitals, or in the parish infirmary,
the subjoined table gives the materials for calculating the death-rate in each.
[See Table top of next page.]
The death-rate* of persons resident in each sub district, without reference
to the place where they happened to die, is therefore, in St. George, Bloomsbury,
20.3 per 1000; in St. Giles' South 33.3 per 1000; and in St. Giles'
North 27.8 per 1000. Herein the workhouse with its residents is excluded.
* In this computation the population for the year 1863 has been computed according
to the rate of change experienced between 1851 and 1861. Thus Bloomsbury has
been estimated to contain 17509 persons; St Giles's South (without the workhouse)
18695. St. Giles' North 17150. All the three death-rates, it is to be further observed,
are rather too high, from the year being taken at 53 weeks, but correction for this is
made in the table that follows.