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16 MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
existence, to local and removable causes. The proportionate
mortality from scarlatina, measles, and
hooping-cough is greatest where the general deathrate
is greatest. Under similar circumstances, too,
we find among the infant population a frequency
and fatality of other diseases, not commonly counted
specific, which warrant us in considering them to
be mainly of endemic and avoidable origin. Such
are the hydrocephalus and convulsions, the diarrhoea,
bronchitis, and pneumonia of infants, which are
often referred to the irritation of teething, but which
prevail in different localities with so marked a proportion
to the causes of other endemic disease that
we may be sure of their partial and considerable
dependence on those local and obviable causes. I
dwell on this aspeet of the subject, and particularly
invite the attention of your Honourable Court to the
table* which illustrates it, because it is in respect of
these diseases that your exertions have already effected
valuable improvements for the health of the
City, and because the future registry of such cases
will attest year by year the further progress of your
sanitary reforms. In examining this index of preventable
deaths, you will notice that those from
fever are fewer by 29 per cent, in the year just terminated
than in the previous twelve months ; that
those from scarlatina are 75 per cent, fewer; those
from infantile zymotic disorders nearly 40 per cent.
fewer: those from erysipelas and puerperal fever
* Appendix No. V.