View report page

74
considerable amelioration under improved hygienic arrangements.
Scrofula is unknown in Hygieapolis! Sunlight and
pure air; efficient drainage and its corollary, a dry sub-soil;
good food, warm clothing, and temperance in all things, are
powerful antidotes to the bane of tubercle, which is fostered
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 sewagetainted
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 an infectious disease, a specific fever of slow progress
with a veiled resemblance to other specific eruptive
fevers; and we are encouraged to hope that a remedy may
ultimately be found for this great scourge of the human race.
Tubercular diseases were the registered causes of 425 deaths
viz., 847 in the Town sub-district, and 78 in Brompton; 122
of the deaths being of children under 5 years of age. The
numbers in the four quarters of the year respectively were
117, 103, 106 and 99; 216 in the winter and 209 in the
summer quarters. Occasionally "phthisis" is returned as
the cause of death in the earliest infancy, a period of life at
which the tubercular diathesis is usually manifested by
diseases of other parts of the body, e.g., brain and bowels,
rather than of the lungs. Such deaths are classified in
Table 3, with those properly certified as due to tuberculosis
and other forms of scrofula, the. total being 33, of which 19
occurred under 5 years of age, including 6 registered in the
Brompton sub-district. Tabes mesenterica, popularly known
as "consumption of the bowels," was the cause of 48 deaths,
3 of them in Brompton, and 46 under 5 years of age.
Tubercular meningitis and Hydrocephalus, (waterton the brain),
were the causes of 67 deaths, 12 of them in Brompton, and