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81
REPORT
ON THE
SANITARY CONDITION OF ST. MAM, ISLINGTON,
FOR OCTOBER, 1860.
No. CXIV.
The registered mortality of the four weeks ending October 27th, has
been excessive. The deaths recorded amount to 320, a number which
is 46 above the corrected mean mortality of the corresponding weeks of
the last ten years. Although cholera furnishes 10 deaths towards this
excess, it does not account for a fourth of it; other diseases were
unusually fatal. Foremost of these stand the disorders of the organs of
respiration. The mean corrected mortality from bronchitis, pneumonia,
&c., for the last ten Octobers is 41; this year the deaths from these
diseases have amounted to 63,—47 of which occurred in children under
four years of age. This high chest mortality was not due to any unusual
degree of cold, inasmuch as during nearly all the month the temperature
of the atmosphere was above the average. But chest diseases have not
stood alone in this respect; small-pox, fever, and the various conditions
registered as atrophy, debility, &c., of infants have all added to the
deaths more largely than is customary in October. As regards smallpox,
my attention has been directed to the crowded and unwholesome
manner in which navvies are living in some of the new streets in Upper
Holloway; among these persons small-pox has been rife during the
month, and thus the disease comes to infect a whole neighbourhood. A
common and most contagious disease like this ought to be extinguished
as we have recently been extinguishing cholera, by the adoption of
proper measures for the destruction of the specific virus in bedding,
clothes, and dwellings. Infected rooms and dwellings we can indeed
deal with under the new Sanitary Act, but this statute is most defective
in the appliances it furnishes for destroying the virus, attaching as it