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WANDSWORTH.
In accordance with the plan pursued in previous years, the
following Report will be found to contain a summary of the main facts
which are necessary for determining and illustrating the sanitary state of
this sub district during the year 1860, and which are tabulated, as far
as is practicable, for the purpose of affording facility for general
reference, and for comparison with those of former years.
The recently-taken census of the population at length affords the
opportunity of doing justice to this town, by assigning to it its proper
sanitary status, which it is my gratifying duty to show is of a high
grade, in controversion of the long existing belief in its alleged
unhealthiness.
Since the year 1665, when the population of this town was literally
decimated by the plague, there is no reason derivable from the old Bills of
mortality, or from the later reports of the Registrar General, for this
belief. In whatever way it may have arisen, however, it has probably
of late years been sustained by the mistaken acceptance of the relation
which the total registered deaths bear to the population as the index of
the natural death-rate, and at the same time by overlooking those extraneous
conditions by which the mortality is the the one hand reduced,
and on the other so greatly and unduly augmented. Thus the Surrey
County Lunatic Asylum furnishes, on an average, considerably more
than one-third of the total deaths registered ; its patients are derived
from without the parish, with a fractional exception, and sometimes (as
during the past year) without any exception, and are subject, as in all
such institutions, to a high mortality. The registered mortality is also
diminished to a certain extent, by the deaths of Wandsworth
parishioners which take place in the workhouse being registered in
Battersea. From these circumstances it will be readily understood that
the assumption of the registered mortality as a datum for the determination
of the natural death-rate must bo entirely fallacious
In the following deductions in this Report, the population of the
Asylum, with its mortality (except such as belongs to Wandsworth), is
withdrawn from, and the deaths of Wandsworth parishioners in the
workhouse are added to the calculation.
Death-rate.
The mean annual death-rate during the past ten years, deduced from
the recent census and the mortality proper to this parish, was 17.86 per
1000 living. This closely corresponds with that obtained from the