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15
SENILE MORTALITY.
At sixty years of age and upwards there were 735 deaths,
as compared with 671, 784, and 778, in the preceding three
years successively. These deaths were equal to 276 per 1,000
on total deaths, the equivalent proportion in London, as a
whole, being 236 per 1,000.
District Rates of Mortality.—The table at page 17
shows the death-rate in the metropolis, the parish, the subdistricts,
the parliamentary divisions and the sanitary districts,
including the "Notting-dale" special area—not only for the
year, as a whole, but also for each of the thirteen fourweekly
periods covered by my monthly reports. In any comparison
of the respective rates with those in 1896, it must be
remembered that the boundaries of three of the sanitary
districts (north-east, north-west and central) as delimited in
1897, differ widely from the districts of the same names as
constituted in 1896. It will be observed that, as usual, the
death-rate in the Town sub-district is far higher than that in
the Brompton sub district, and the same observation applies
to the parliamentary division of North Kensington as compared
with the southern division of the borough. In three
of the sanitary districts the death-rate exceeded that of the
parish, as a whole (15.6 per 1,000) viz. the central (16.2), the
north (18.5), and the north-west (32.2). The last named
district, as now delimited,and containing a population of 16,450,
includes the so-called "Notting-dale" special area. The
mortal statistics of the district are unsatisfactory: the deathrate
in 1897 (32.2 per 1000) was considerably more than
double the rate in the remainder of the parish (13.9 per 1,000);
the zymotic death-rate (4.18 per 1000) was excessive, being
more than two-and-a-half times as high as that of the remainder
of the parish (l.6 per 1,000); the waste of infant
life was also excessive, the deaths under one year (157) being
equivalent to 230 per 1,000 births registered, the infantile
deaths in the remainder of the parish being in the proportion