View report page

13
•
which is the average for the whole country. In
fact, in the Eastern division of the City the proportion
is rather more than 11 per cent., and in the
Western nearly 14. It is this large mortality of
children which swells the death-rate, and it will
be seen from Table V. what are the causes which
determine it.
In this table you will notice that 630, or
rather more than one-fifth of all the deaths are
from developmental diseases, as phthisis, scrofula,
tabes, and hydrocephalus; 577, or nearly a
like proportion, are from zymotic causes, of a
more or less preventable character; and 543 are
from acute affections of lungs, chiefly among
infants, the results of exposure to cold. Here,
then, is a group of maladies causing in all about
three-fifths of the whole mortality for the year,
which might, with due sanitary precautions, have
been greatly mitigated. In some cases the effects
of these precautions have been clearly manifested ;
for instead of an average death-rate of 107 persons
from continued fever, there have been but 70
deaths. Scarlet fever has also declined from 91 to
66, and small-pox from 32 to 4; but some other
diseases of this class have been more than usually
fatal—measles, for example, have risen from an
average of 78 deaths in the year to 119, and the
group of maladies characterised by special affections
of the throat—as croup, diphtheria, and whooping