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Women in any case tend to pamper their husbands stomachs more than their
own.
The slight rise in cancer of the uterus is not significant.
DIABETES
Quite a large number of women died from diabetes. Four were
under the age of 65. Though diabetes can now be well controlled by insulin
and diet the resistance of diabetic patients to infection is lower than
average and infection exacerbates the disease. It is possible that influenza
or respiratory infection has played a part in this increase in deaths
from diabetes.
GASTRITIS, ENTERITIS AND DIARRHOEA
This group represents, as I have said before,a pocket of
resistance to medical advance which needs to be mopped up. The patients
who died were not, as one might expect, babies, but adults, the ages
ranging from 25 to 85. These deaths emphasise that control of the
diarrhoeal infections is still of great importance.
NEPHRITIS AND NEPHROSIS
The death rate remains about the same level. Though I would
prefer to record no deaths, the figure is lower than that in most Boroughs
in Greater London.
TUBERCULOSIS
All the female deaths and two of the male deaths were in
persons over the age of 75. Three men died between 55 and 65 and two
between 65 and 75, and it may well be that tuberculosis shortened life in
these cases.
SYPHILIS
Syphilis takes a long time to kill, and the man who died in
his 60's had probably had the disease for many years. Despite the opportunities
of cure given by anti-biotics syphilis remains a dread disease.
It is almost always acquired through close contact with a syphilitic sore.
SUICIDE
There were fewer suicides, for some reason. Most of the
people who took their life in 1959 were old people, and loneliness may
well have been one of the causes of their distress.
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