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14
Prevention of Consumption and Diminution of Infant
Mortality.
A Health Society has been formed in the Borough, to cooperate
with the Local Authority in ameliorating general
sanitary conditions, and especially for the purpose of
attempting to do whatever may be practicable in the
prevention of consumption and the diminution of infant
mortality.
With regard to consumption, no age is exempt, the infant
at the breast and the octogenarian alike are often infected by
the minute parasite; but the special age favouring its
development is that of the working period of life, which
renders the prevention of the malady so important from
every point of view—humanitarian, social, national.
The connection of the malady with poverty, for
instance, may be illustrated by the following recent case:—
F. C. N., male, aged 38, admitted into St. Marylebone
Infirmary March 6th suffering from phthisis. He leaves
at home a wife and five children, the wife expecting to
be confined in three weeks time, the family live in a small
two-roomed back cottage, rent 6s. weekly. The wife will
receive for thirteen weeks contributions from a slate club,
beginning at 10s. and decreasing to 6s.; after the thirteenth
week, this source of income ceases.
Quite irrespective of the question of clothes and
incidental expenses to pay rent and to buy food and
firing, the lowest sum which would support this family
in the bare necessaries of life would be 16s. per week.
The bearing of such sad cases on public health is sufficiently
obvious.
Given seven persons in two rooms, one of them being
consumptive, there is a good chance of the seeds of the
malady being implanted in one or more of the remaining
six, and it is in such cases that a voluntary organisation