View report page

12
Parish of St. George the Martyr, Southwark.
Respiratory Diseases.

In 1892 the total mortality under this heading was 539, which fell to 419 in 1893,
and to 363 in 1894. This rate is above that of the whole of London. The excess
may, I think, be traced to the overcrowded state of the parish, both as to tenements
and to workshops, and to the number of indoor occupations which predispose to
respiratory diseases.
A good deal of the mortality among young children is due to lung troubles, which
often follow measles and whooping cough.
The returns of deaths from consumption are not so heavy as one would expect in
so densely crowded and poverty-stricken a district. At the same time it should be
noted that the registrars have to depend for these figures on the death certificates,
and there can be no doubt that a certain number of cases are not correctly described.
This applies especially to alcoholism, and to such hereditary and constitutional disorders
as syphilis or consumption.
Mortality of Infants and Children.
The death-rates of infants under one year, and of children under five years, are
worthy of careful attention, as they afford valuable indirect evidence of the sanitary
condition of a community.
By this I do not mean that all preventable infant and child mortality is to be
attributed to defective sanitation. Other factors—to be mentioned further on—
doubtless play a considerable part in either destroying or crippling the lives of these
slum-bred children.
The fact remains, however, that the most sensitive test of the sanitary condition
of a district lies in the death-rate prevailing among its young population. During
1894 the number of infants who died within the first year of life in St. George's
was 437. These figures give the high rate of 211 deaths to every 1,000 births in St.
George's, as compared with 143 deaths per 1,000 births for London.
The average rate for the three years 1892-3-4, for St. George's was 204, and for
the Borough Eoad sub-district, 231, as against 151 for London.
The highest rate in the metropolis for 1894, was 211 in St. George's; Southwark,
and the lowest in Stoke Newington, where it was 86.
Of a total of 1398 deaths at all ages in St. George's, 810 occurred under five years,
which gives the large percentage of 53.2 to the total number of deaths. It is wellknown
to specialists in children's disuses that "wasting" constitutes one of the
commonest causes of death in infants' Thousands of children die every year in
London simply because they are fed on food which they cannot digest.