View report page

18
served out of the same churns, emphatically negatived the suspicion.
I was at a loss, therefore, to account for the outbreak until it occurred to
me to enquire whether the charwoman, instead of being, as supposed, one
of the victims of the outbreak, in the course of her weekly attendance
at the house, might not really have introduced the infection ? The
result of this enquiry was eminently satisfactory in one sense, for it
turned out that on the 25th September, the first day of her being
employed at the house, she was suffering violently from Diarrhoea
(a symptom of enteric fever), and again on the 2nd October, her
second and last attendance. It came out in the course of the further
enquiry suggested by the discovery of her condition, that so far from
the six cases having occurred simultaneously, there was a natural
sequence. The charwoman infected the servants' w.c.: the housemaid
succumbed first to the infection, viz., on the 6th October: she used
the servants' w.c. and the w.c. in the upper part of the house: the
three young ladies were attacked on the 7th and the cook on the 9th
October. The ladies and the servants recovered, but the charwoman,
who resided in Chelsea, succumbed to the malady.
It may be mentioned that doubts occasionally arise whether deaths
classified to enteric fever were really due to this disease ? The term
"typhoid" is still used somewhat loosely in medicine to express a
group of symptoms common to many diseases, especially towards their
fatal termination. The term "gastric fever," which by the RegistrarGeneral
is always read "enteric fever," is employed in like manner ;
and practitioners who have certified deaths from this cause, have now
and then expressed surprise on finding them classified to typhoid
fever.
Simple Continued Fever was the cause of eight deaths, two of them
in the Brompton sub-district.
Diarrhoea.—The corrected decennial average deaths from diarrhoea
is 148, and the deaths in 1878 were so many as 181. Last year,
however, there were only 72 deaths, of which 58 were of children
under five years of age, including 45 under one year. This great
falling off in diarrhoeal mortality was common to the whole of London,
and was due to the cold, wet weather which prevailed throughout the
" summer," when infantile diarrhoea is usually so great a scourge. The