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waters have a range of double that extent. Other causes, however,
contribute to the production of diarrhoea, among which may be cited
artificial feeding. It is difficult to preserve milk from undergoing
change in hot weather, and the heat, which generally "turns the milk"
acid, simply, not seldom in the close atmosphere of crowded rooms, is the
cause of a putrid change. No doubt want of attention to the condition
of the feeding bottle is also an important factor in the chain of causation,
as the slightest collection of sour matter in any part of the apparatus
leads to speedy change in the milk. Not uncommonly, moreover,
ignorant mothers allow the milk to remain in the bottle in the hot bed,
till it is wanted: or feed their children on farinaceous and other
indigestible foods, which disorder the bowels and almost infallibly
cause diarrhoea. The disease, once set up in young infants at this
season of the year, is apt to prove intractable, more especially when
the cause to which it is due continues in operation. The disease, again,
is at first thought too lightly of, and in many instances medical aid is
not sought until the patient has become so much reduced as to be
beyond the power of restoration under the circumstances in which the
children of the poor are brought up; and I say the children of the poor,
because it is among the children of the poorer classes that the disease
prevails in its most fatal form.
Scarlet Fever.—The deaths from scarlet fever 77, viz., 8 in
Brompton, 62 in the Town sub-district, and 7 in the hospitals, were
below the average. The disease seems to have assumed a tolerably
mild form, as a rule, throughout the year; but two or three groups
of severe and fatal cases in single houses occurred, amply illustrating
the danger poor persons incur by keeping cases of scarlet fever
at their homes where it is impossible to isolate them. It is often
done because the individual case is mild (it is then called Scarlatina,
which is only Scarlet Fever put into Latin); but it cannot
be too generally known that the mildest cases frequently prove the
most serious in the long run, because, owing possibly to want of care
during convalescence, they are often followed by those sequelce—kidney
disease, dropsy, &c., by which life is ultimately cut short after a more
or less prolonged period of illness and suffering. Many an adult
succumbs in what should be the prime of life to "Bright's disease," the
foundation of which had been laid in a "mild" attack of Scarlatina.