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12
MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
by typhus double in number those produced by
cholera, the list of persons attacked by the former
disease, and thereby for a long while incapacitated
and suffering, is immeasurably beyond this proportion.
Two or three times the number of deaths
by cholera would give you the number of seizures,
and enable you to estimate all the direct mischief
caused by it; while, in regard of typhus, probably
for one death there are twenty cases of protracted
illness, tardy convalescence, and injured constitution.
Not only are the deaths double in number,
but each of them indicates an infinitely larger
amount of sickness and suffering not immediately
productive of death.
The frightful suddenness of the rarer disease,
and the condensation of its epidemic fatality into
some single year, give it more apparent importance
than belongs to the familiar name of typhus; but
I can assure your Honourable Court, that if a large
amount of preventable death, and a still larger
amount of preventable misery, be strong arguments
for sanitary improvement and activity, those arguments
are more abundantly derivable from the
constant pressure of fever and its kindred maladies,
than from the sharper but infrequent visitations of
the foreign pestilence.
In the third column of this table come deaths by
scarlatina. Of these, perhaps a certain proportion
would occur even under favourable circumstances;
for, whatever mayhave been the original derivation of