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30
The Medical Officers of Health feel that it is imperative
upon them to call attention to the anomalous state of
the law, which thus permits, within three years, in a
single parish, 177 human beings to be consigned to the
grave without any skilled inquiry as to the manner, or the
diseases by which they came by their deaths; and as the
majority of these were children, of whom a considerable
number were illegitimate, and put out to nurse, or an
incumbrance to those having them in charge, it is obvious
that a dangerous degree of impunity is afforded to those
whose poverty or shame might incite them to the commission
of the gravest crime.