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steadily increasing in number. These cases are a chief test of the usefulness
of a dispensary. The class of poor persons above the rank of paupers, who
require gratuitous medical assistance are largely indebted to the out-patient
departments of hospitals, but the dispensary alone is the charity to which
they can look when their illness is of a sort to be made worse by going out of
doors. But for the Bloomsbury Dispensary a great proportion of these thousand
persons who receive assistance at their own homes must have been
driven to seek medical relief from the parish.

The mortality among the Dispensary patients, in proportion to the number
of severe cases, was slightly less in 1863 than in the preceding year.
At the British Lying-in Hospital in Endell Street four deaths only
occurred, three of them were of children, and the remaining one was of a
mother who died from puerperal peritonitis.
SECTION VI.—On the Deaths in St. Giles', where there was no Certificate
of the Cause from a Medical Practitioner or Coroner.
These deaths in 1863 numbered twenty-six. In nine of these cases there
was no medical attendant in the fatal illness, and in none was the cause of
death certified by a medical practitioner. In none of these cases was any
enquiry made as to the real cause of death; but in all, the death was registered,
a certificate for interment was therefrom obtained, and in every case the body
was buried without further question.
The registration laws do not appear, indeed, to have been enacted
primarily to provide information as to the cause of death, but as they have
long been administered, these laws have provided a most valuable check upon
the manner in which persons have come by their death. In at least 97 cases
out of a hundred, certificates of the cause of death are made by medical practitioners
in set form and with a fair amount of accuracy. But the law has
not provided for this practice, but has permitted registration of death without
any other evidence of its cause than the statement of some person present.
It has repeatedly been contended in these reports that the practice which
is so nearly universal, should, in the interests of society, be made a matter of
law. That any certificates of the cause of death are given depends under
present arrangements upon the administration of an office, and upon the
voluntary services of medical practitioners. Even if one should make the
blunder of looking on statistics as an end in themselves, instead of a means
for advancing the department of knowledge to which they are applied, it
would be desirable to get our figures freed from 3 per cent. of wholly unreliale
data. But the subject matter of these statistics is the life and death of