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Registrar-General classified to enteric fever. The certifying Surgeon
however, informed me that by "gastric fever" he did not intend to
imply "enteric fever." He had seen the patient once only, viz., on
the day she died. Another case of supposed enteric fever was that
of a very unhealthy man at Princes Road, Notting Hill, who had long
suffered from scrofulous ulcers of the feet. The true cause of this
death probably was pyemia—the symptoms assuming a "typhoid"
character. Another doubtful case was that of a gentleman aged
74, at Fawcett Street, West Brompton, who had been ailing a long
time, congestion of the lungs being the immediate cause of death.
The age of this patient excludes the probability of enteric fever,
and the same remark applies in respect of the case at Gledhow
Gardens, of a gentlemen aged 84, whose death was certified as due
to typhoid fever; bronchitis. No mention of 'fever' appeared to
have been made during the progress of the illness in any of these
doubtful cases. There was an outbreak of enteric fever at Cornwall
Mews traceable to a previous case in the family prior to their
removal from Brighton. There was another severe outbreak—five
cases—in a family residing at Fenelon Road. There had been
two casae of illness previously in another family in the same house,
one of them fatal, the registered cause of death being diphtheria.
It is probable that the first case in the larger group was due to
poisoning by sewer gas, and as no precautions were taken to prevent
the spread of the disease, which was alleged to be non-infectious,
the occurrence of the subsequent cases is sufficiently explained.
A fatal case at St. Mark's Road, Notting Hill, was popularly
ascribed to effluvia from a distant manure heap in an adjoining
field, on which offal from a slaughter house had been deposited:
but there were sanitary defects in the house of the deceased
adequate to account for the illness, if it were enteric fever. It was
very doubtful, however, whether the disease was one of specific
fever at all; the cause of death as registered being "low or typhus
fever," terms by no means synonymous and not at all corresponding
to enteric fever.
Simple continued Fever.—The deaths from this disease were 5,
viz., 4 in the Town sub-district and 1 in Brompton.
Diarrhea, which caused only 71 deaths in 1879, was fatal to