View report page

99
tilings, are powerful antidotes to the bane of tubercle, which is
fostered by the opposites—by squalor and dirt, by cold and
nakedness, by vice and intemperance, by the want of the proper
necessaries of life, by over-crowding in ill-constructed, unventilated,
and sewage-tainted houses, and, in a word, by whatever is
inimical to the maintenance of a typical condition of health. The
cases that occur in the well-to-do classes, it has been the custom
to say, are usually traceable to the influence of heredity, but
modern researches, which have thrown great light on the origin
of tubercle, raise a presumption that tuberculosis may be really
an infectious disease, a specific fever of slow progress with a
veiled resemblance to other specific eruptive fevers ; and they
encourage the hope that in time a remedy may be found for this
great scourge of the human race. It is satisfactory to note a
considerable reduction in the number of deaths from these
diseases as compared with 1881, when they were 442, for in 1882
they were the registered causes of 417 deaths only, viz., 342 in
the Town sub-district, and 75 in Brompton ; 120 of the deaths
being of children under 5 years of age. The numbers in the four
quarters of the year respectively were 109, 86, 97 and 125; 234
in the winter and 183 in the summer quarters. Not uncommonly
" phthisis" is returned as the cause of death in the
earliest infancy, a period of life at which tubercular disease
usually manifests its presence in other parts of the body, e.g.,
brain and bowels, rather than in the lungs. Such deaths are here
classified with those properly certified due to tuberculosis and
other forms of scrofula, the total being 44, of which 29 occurred
under 5 five years of age, including 9 registered in the Brompton
sub-district. Tabes mesenterica, popularly known as "consumption
of the bowels," was the cause of 46 deaths (44 under
5 years of age) : 8 of them in Brompton. Tubercular meningitis
and Hydrocephalus (water on the brain), were the causes of 54
deaths—(13 in Brompton), 45 under 5 years of age.
Phthisis, the form of disease popularly known as " decline," or
"consumption," was the cause of 273 deaths, irrespective of the
deaths of non-parishioners at the Consumption Hospital, which