View report page

6
jured by an iron bar; and a boy who was drawing a truck which
was upset by a waggon, and inflicted a wound in the thigh.
One of them suffered amputation, and four died of superadded
pyæmia—the name of a state of subtle blood poisoning
which ensues; when the vapours or decomposing discharges of
the patient's own wounds, or the general foul air of the
hospital, enter the blood, and set up fever and abscesses from
which the patient rarely recovers.
There were four deaths from burns also of children
whose " clothes ignited at a grate," or who set themselves
on fire whilst reaching things from the mantelpiece. One
boy of 6 was drowned whilst playing on the banks of the
Thames—one infant suffocated in bed with its parents.
Of suicides there were two; one by poison, one by
hanging.
There remain to be mentioned the deaths of two infants,
under the head of " causes not specified or ill defined "—one
found in Hyde Park, and another on a doorstep in Halkin-street;
besides one newly-born babe found in a garden in Grosvenorplace,
and declared to have been murdered. But these are
not the only victims of poverty, carelessness, ignorance, and
other bad moral conditions. There is many a child, week
after week, registered as having died of some disease with a
learned name, but which we know really to have been let
die of neglect. In such cases trivial ailments assume new
and dangerous proportions. Thus we have one infant dying
of bad eyes, another of three weeks dying of sloughing and
ulceration of the right pectoral muscles; the child of a
" general servant," aged 3 months, found dead in bed from
want of nourishment; and two infants dying of congenital
syphilis. All these facts give evidence of what we say in
our Annual Report, year after year, that the mortality of a
parish is not merely an affair of unhealthy site, or of infectious
disease, but of frugality, possession of intelligence