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5
Scarlet Fever occasioned 313 deaths, no such mortality haying resulted from it
in any year since 1863, when 392 deaths occurred. The fatality of scarlet fever,
however, varies so much at different times, from season, weather, and epidemic
constitution, that the mortality affords no certain indication of the prevalence of
the disease. The number of cases in the public practice of the parish was 714; in
1863 it was 672. Hence we infer that while it was as prevalent, and perhaps more
prevalent than in the latter year, the fatality of the disease was not so great. The
period of greatest epidemic extension commenced in the third week in August. An
outbreak in which 54 cases were recorded happened indeed in the 2nd and 3rd
weeks of July, but it abated during the next three weeks. Between the third week
in August and the fourth week in November, 412 of all the cases occurred, that is to
say, in the course of 15 weeks. Scarlet fever approached us from the parishes
on our eastern border, and throughout the epidemic prevailed more in the
eastern than in the western half of the parish. Of the 313 deaths 180 occurred in
the eastern and 133 in the western sub-district.
Hooping Cough became prevalent as the year 1868 closed, and has continued to
be epidemic during the whole of 1869. Its greatest prevalence was between the first
week in April and the end of August. Altogether, we recorded 1,014 cases in the
public practice ; the largest number recorded in any previous year was 709, in 1866.
The deaths (all but 10 of children under five years of age,) numbered 324. The
largest number in any previous year was 220 in 1866.
Small Pox produced only 14 deaths in the entire year, the number of cases in
public practice being 49.
Relapsing Fever.—It appears from the report of the London Fever Hospital
that during 1869 forty-eight cases of "relapsing fever" were admitted into that
institution from Islington. Some of these were tramps sent from the workhouse.
The greater part were sent in from the out-door parochial practice. I have a record
of the names, addresses, and ages of thirty-five of those cases included among the
102 cases of fever among the out-door poor in Table II. The first of these cases
was that of a boy aged 18, residing at No. 10, Rose and Crown Court, and from him
the disease spread first of all to the four remaining members of his family, all of
whom dwelt together in a very small, damp, and miserable room on the ground
floor of this house. From this family it spread to No. 14, where the four members
of one family and a boy were attacked in succession. At No. 8, first of all the five
persons living together in the ground floor room were attacked, and at a later period
five members in succession of a family living in a room on the next floor, making
altogether ten persons in the house. At No. 11, four members of a family living in
the ground floor room and a person who came to lodge with them from another part
of the parish, were seized with the disease, and one died. At No. 12, three members
of one family were attacked, and at No. 5, the woman who is engaged by the owner