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REPORT
on the
SANITARY CONDITION OF ST. MARY, ISLINGTON,
FOR OCTOBER, 1869.
No. CLXX.
The death-rate during the month of October has been as nearly as
possible the average as corrected of the ten previous Octobers. Three
hundred and twenty-eight deaths were registered. Of the two
prevalent epidemic diseases, hooping cough has been declining, as
testified both by our mortality and sickness table; scarlet fever, on the
contrary, has been prevailing more seriously than ever, for whereas
123 cases were reported in the public practice during the five weeks of
September, and 44 deaths registered as having occurred throughout the
parish, I record during the four weeks of October 137 cases and 53
deaths. The disease which hitherto has been mostly met with on the
eastern side of the parish has now travelled to the western, nearly an
equal number of deaths having been registered in each sub-district.
As matters stand at present, your Sanitary Officers have been able to do
very little in the way of checking its progress, one of the most
important preventive measures of all, namely, the immediate removal
of the sick to a hospital, or the removal of the healthy from an infected
house or room to a place of safety, being impossible. The fever
hospital is full, and has long been so, and no other place for the sick
has yet been provided. Our proceedings have consequently been
confined to the carrying out of such imperfect disinfections as are
practicable in a house where the inmates still remain. Two important
memoranda have been issued upon this subject, one by the Medical
Officer of the Privy Council, and the other by the Metropolitan
Association of Medical Officers of Health, in reply to a challenge made
to them by the Registrar-General. To both these documents I beg
your earnest attention.
During the course of the month I received from the Medical
Department of the Privy Council a memorandum touching the
reappearance in London, after a long interval, of a form of continued
fever, which to us is almost a new disease. It is now commonly known
under the name of relapsing fever. It is the same disease which was
known in Ireland as the "famine fever." It is highly infectious, its spread
being promoted by the low condition of the system, induced by deficiency
of nutritious food, misery, and crowding. Although of little fatality, it