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9
belong to the Town registration sub-district, and 21 to Brompton.
The victims of this malady are infants and young children; death,
when it happens, being usually the result of some intercurrent complication,
as disease of the breathing organs. It is scarcely too much to
say that many deaths from whooping cough are "preventible"—the
fatal complication, e.g., pneumonia, bronchitis, &c., being due to exposure
of the patient. It is a good rule to confine children to the
house, and indeed to one room, during the more acute stages of whooping
cough, but in the homes of the poor it is often found quite impracticable
to do so. The children of the poor furnish a large proportion
of the fatal cases; and it is observable that scarcely more than one
death in nine occurred in the Brompton registration sub-district, which
is largely inhabited by the wealthier part of the community; children
moreover being relatively lewer in number in this sub-district.
Diarrhœa comes next after whooping-cough in the order of
fatality, having been the cause of 181 deaths, of which only one-ninth
(20) occurred in the Brompton registration sub-district. Diarrhœa as
a factor in the mortality returns is an infantile disease, and a disease
peculiar to hot weather, the time of year at which it prevails in its
most fatal form being determined by the temperature. Heat appears to
be a direct exciting cause of the malady, and it has been noticed that
diarrhoea is always fatally prevalent when the Thames water attains a
temperature much above 60º Fahr. The Registrar-General in his 29th
"Weekly Return" (July 20), referring to this subject, said—"The
Thames temperature which had been 60° rose in the last week of June to
65°, in the three following weeks it was 68, 66, and 67, The weekly
deaths from diarrhœa and simple cholera, which had been 23, rose to
78, 156, 256, and 349 in the corresponding weeks." He added the
following significant remark:—"The deaths from diarrhoea are differently
distributed in the fields of the water companies; thus the deaths
in the last four weeks were 786 in the districts supplied with Thames
and Lea waters, whereas the deaths in the districts supplied with
water drawn from the chalk by the Kent Company were 19. Out of
the same population the deaths in the former were to the deaths in the
latter as 3 to 1." It may be mentioned that the Kent Company's water,
obtained from deep wells, attains a maximum temperature of about
58o Fahr. only, and has a range of about 13º Fahr., whereas the river