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52
Death-rate. Calculated from the total deaths registered
and the officially estimated population the death-rate of
the past year was 18.07 per 1,000 inhabitants. In this
estimate, correction is made for those institutions within
the sub-district by which the mortality is unduly raised.
These are the County Lunatic Asylums, St. Peter's
Hospital and the Hospital for Incurables, the inmates of
which institutions are almost exclusively derived from
without the sub-district; moreover they undergo no
natural increase, and are subject to a high mortality, the
latter forming on an average about one-fifth of all deaths
registered.
If the deaths of Wandsworth inhabitants that occurred
in institutions external to the sub-district be included in
the calculation, the death-rate was 21.49 per 1,000; but
this rate cannot be accepted as accurate, inasmuch as it
includes the deaths of non-parishioners dying within the
sub-district, of which there is no available record, but
which probably approximate in number those of persons
dying in outlying institutions.
A lapse of seven years from the date of the last census,
renders the determination of the population, and consequently
of the birth and death-rate, by the official method
more or less untrustworthy, in consequence of the disproportionately
large increase of the inhabitants by
immigration, as already shewn. Under such circumstances
a far more reliable method of calculating the number of
the population is derived from the proportional number
of births, the ratio of which in a given population is found
to be tolerably constant.—(See Report 1875, page 7).
Estimated by the proportion which the mean annual
number of births bore to the mean annual number of