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the Mount-street Workhouse, and 2 of non-parishioners in St.
George's Hospital, so that the entire number is 46. As we
have said before, the difference between a high and low rate
of mortality in the first and third quarters of the year depends
on differences of temperature, with bronchitis in the
cold, and diarrhoea in the heat, and on the amount of zymotic
disease. This quarter, unluckily, there is a rather full
average of both.
The chief victims of bowel disorder are young children.
Out of the 46 cases just mentioned, 34 were under 5 years
of age. If to these we add the 6 who died from privation of
breast milk, one from scurvy, or the purples, as the vulgar
call it, 25 from scrofulous disease, 12 from the brain diseases
of infancy, 11 from premature birth and mal-development,
and 16 from various forms of atrophy, we get 108 children
under 5 as an instalment of young lives cut off by those
town influences, which deserve more and more in these days
the attention of the philanthropist and philosopher. Granted
a child born of delicate parents, brought up by hand on food
not always fit for it, or, if fit, at times a little sour, living
in close ill-ventilated rooms, and with a taint of sewer
vapour in the house in hot weather, these conditions are quite
enough for engendering fatal diarrhoea. Almost the first
case recorded in the mortality returns for the quarter is that
of an infant, child of a medical man, in a very ill-ventilated
house, never sweet, and in which, though inhabited by a
medical family for at least thirty years, the drainage consisted
of an old broken brick drain covered with wood. So
Mr. Grant found when we set him to explore the house.
Out of the deaths from bowel disorder, 3 in the Belgrave
sub-district were sufficiently marked to entitle them to the
name cholera. One was the death of a child of 20 months,
at 5, Flask-lane; the other of a child of 4 months, at
Darnley's-cottages; the third of a farrier, set. 55, in Hart's-