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children under 5, old people and women, as have the population of England and Wales.
By thus eliminating this disturbing factor of age and sex distribution different communities
can be brought into strict comparison with one another.
"In 1883 the Registrar-General commenced a method of correcting the death
rates of the great towns of England and Wales. Taking account of the differences of
age and sex distribution between these and the latter, he has calculated a factor for each
great town by which the recorded death rate must be multiplied so as to allow for the
differences of age and sex, and thus places them as regards these matters on an equal
footing. You thus get death rates, the differences in which can be put down to general
sanitary conditions alone. In illustration of this I have taken the following rates for a
table calculated on the Registrar's method by the Medical Officer of the London County
Council, published in his Annual Report for 1902.
"It will be seen from this that in London and the Boroughs the correction raises
the death rate, showing that there is in them a preponderance of people living at ages
when the death rate is low (viz. between 5 and 50), and also of women, sufficient to
keep the recorded death rate down, notwithstanding the great number of children
under 5."

Infantile Mortality.
This is calculated as the number of children dying under one year of age to every 1,000
births of the same year. This is done as the infantile population is difficult to get owing to the
inaccuracy of the Census on this point. This is not so much due to enumeration as to the
confusion in the minds of parents between a current and a completed year.
The total number of infantile deaths in the Borough in 1905 was 631, viz., 422, 164 and
45 for the sub-division of Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, and St. Olave's respectively; the corresponding
figures for 1904 being 723 for the whole Borough, and 477, 187 and 59 for its divisions. This
gives an infantile mortality for 1905 of 147 for the Borough, the other figures being 146 for
Bermondsey, 145 for Rotherhithe, and 170 St. Olave's.

This is a substantial and very satisfactory decrease as far as it goes, but the figure is still
much too high and the decrease must remain permanent if one is to draw conclusions from it.