View report page

14 MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
lity of the past year holds the same proportion to
the general mortality as in the Registrar-General's
septennial period, being of the whole.
Lest any undue importance should be ascribed
to the influence of bad or inappropriate articles of
diet in producing this large infant mortality, I may
inform you that the rate of death is highest during
that very early period of life when the child depends
for nourishment on its mother; so that, of a thousand
male children in the first year of life there die within
the district of the City of London Union 242, within
that of the East and West London Unions 276.
The causes, which thus decimate the young population
of the City of London, are the common conditions
of district unhealthiness—the conditions
which it lies within the scope of sanitary legislation
to amend. But, inasmuch as the few days of these
wretched children are passed mainly within doors,
so their high mortality constitutes the readiest and
least fallacious evidence of the unwholesomeness of
the dwellings in which they die: and hence I am
acquainted with no correcter material for estimating
the sanitary condition of a district than is afforded
by the death-rate of its infant population.
Secondly, with regard to the alleged particular
causes of death; I have extracted from our general
registry, and have grouped in a separate table,
those cases of death from acute disease which seem
peculiarly due to physical causes affecting large
numbers of persons.