View report page

8
The birth-rate in Kensington is low by comparison with that of
London. Last year it was 32.9 per 1,000 (London 36.5.) In this
respect again, we have evidence of a material difference between
the sub-districts in the character of their population. The rich
Brompton district with, no doubt, a larger excess of females, including
domestic servants, had a birth-rate of only 21.9 per 1,000,
while in the Town sub-district, with its larger proportion of poor
people—a fecund race, the birth-rate was 33.3 per 1,000.
Having said so much in illustration of the diiferences that prevail
and distinguish the two sub-districts—differences that make
sanitary work easy in the South, and so arduous in the north, I
propose, before passing to the detailed subjects of the annual report,
to submit some observations on the mortality, &c., from the
ZYMOTIC DISEASES.
The year 1876 was chiefly characterised, so far at least as Kensington
is concerned, by the somewhat extensive prevalence of
certain of these diseases.
Measles was very prevalent and very fatal. It caused 128 deaths,
103 of which were registered in the first half of the year. The
corrected decennial average number of deaths from this disease
is 65. It is to be feared that parents, the poor especially,
under-rate the importance of measles, and the same remark applies
with at least equal force to the other specially infantile diseases—whooping-cough
and diarrhoea. It is a well-known fact that the
great majority of the deaths from these diseases occur among the
poor, and though in respect of measles and whooping-cough the influence
of infection is necessarily more intense where the overcrowding
is greatest, it must be apparent that if the same care were taken
of their children by the poor as among the rich (though it is
generally impossible), the class-mortality from the same diseases
would not present such extreme differences. The deaths from uncomplicated
measles are few by comparison. Out of 103 deaths
registered in the first half of the year, only 12 were so returned;
while 52 were attributed to complications affecting the breathing
organs alone. The deaths were spread over a large area in the
North. As usual Brompton enjoyed a comparative immunity, the
deaths in that sub-district numbering 16 as against 112 in the
"Town" sub-district.
Small-Pox.—Towards the close of the year, small-pox became
epidemic in London. The disease had been in remarkable abeyance
since the close of the great epidemic of 1871-2. In Kensington
not one death from this cause was registered between January,
1873, and February, 1876. In the latter year, however, 8 deaths