London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972

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Finsbury 1913

Annual report on the public health of Finsbury for the year 1913

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48
The deaths in 1913 from bronchitis and pneumonia occurred
chiefly in the following streets :—Affleck Street, Baker's Row,
Dufferin Street, Easton Street, Farringdon Road, Galway Street,
Gee Street, Lever Street, Great Bath Street, Hatfield Street,
Northampton Buildings, Red Lion Street, St. John Street, St.
Helena Street and Sidney Street.
The deaths from premature birth were mostly in Affleck Street,
Baron Street, Bowling Green Lane, Cow Cross Street, Farringdon
Road, Galway Street, Lever Street, Meredith Street, Mitchell
Street, Norman Street, Pentonville Road, Seward Street, and
Upper Smith Street, that is, in what may be called the middle
stratum of the Finsbury population, and not in the slums.
The deaths from diarrhæal diseases occurred chiefly in the mean
and squalid streets of the borough. In May of every year the
following leaflet on Summer Diarrhoea is distributed to every
tenement in those streets where deaths from this cause have
mostly occurred in the preceding year, and to other special streets
where the occupants are known to be domestically dirty and careless.
During the summer the leaflet is distributed and re-distributed
in these streets where these deaths occur, as soon as possible
after the receipt of the Registrar-General's weekly death returns.
It is believed that the people who live in these streets are much
more likely to seriously consider the instruction imparted by the
leaflet when they know that a death from this cause has occurred
near to their own homes, and when the mean-street funeral, with
its dingy plumes and dreary trappings, has advertised them of
the occasion.
SUMMER DIARRHŒA.
Every summer during the warm weather, many hundreds of
babies get sickness and diarrhoea, and very many die.
This illness is nearly always caused by dirt getting into baby's
mouth in some way—from dirty feeding bottles, teats, dummies,
comforters, from dirty milk-jugs, from condensed milk tins left
open to the air, from flies, or from the mother's hands or baby's
hands if they have not been washed and kept thoroughly clean.