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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health—1873—4. 3
Parisb of Saint George the Martnr. Southwark.
ANNUAL REPORT
MADE TO THE VESTRY
by the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
FOR THE YEAR ENDING LADY DAY, 1874.
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,
By reason of a long and wearing indisposition, I shall be compelled to give you a
somewhat short Report; indeed had I not possessed some of the material by me, I should
only have been able to give you little more than the bare statistics, as I have been incapacitated
mentally and physically from writing satisfactorily.
Reports are most tedious to hear and read; indeed they have been called" most confidential,"
and if you want a secret kept, all that you have to do is to place it within one,
where it will remain free from discovery: they are taken up, the leaves turned carelessly
over, hastily glanced at, and then put down again. Yet these annuals are useful; they
give in a small space a considerable amount of information concerning the condition of
the District to which they refer. They tell the number of deaths, and point out the causes
which brought about each death ; they lay bare the worst parts of the district, where epidemics
run riot, and where the death rate is highest. They mark out the seasons of the
year which are most prejudicial to life, and the effects which a change of temperature
will rapidly produce upon health. Thus we now know that while in the 17 th century
the mortality was greatest in summer (July, August, September,) it is now greatest in
the winter, shewing, that the then wretched sanitary state of the people proved more fatal
in the warm and healthy months, than in the cold and fatal months : cold being most
inimical to the health of a large class of the people. A fall of temperature in London from
45° to 27o will increase the weekly mortality by 400, bronchitis being the chief cause of the
increase. In eighteen large towns including London, which are estimated to contain p
population of six and a half millions of persons, the death rate during five weeks ending
February first, when the mean temperature averaged 42°.0, or 5° 0 above the average, the
annual death rate averaged 21.9 per 1000, while in the last eight weeks of the quarter,
when the mean temperature was 38°.l, or 2°.1 below the average, the death rate was 26 6
per 1000 (R. G.).