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accountable for a large share of the misery of his race. "Drink"
is the fruitful parent of vice and crime, as well as being the cause
of much bodily sickness, mental trouble, moral degradation, ruin,
and of many premature deaths: it fills our prisons and workhouses,
our asylums and hospitals, our cemeteries, and, though
happily to a largely decreasing extent, our National Exchequer !
Class 4.—Constitutional Diseases.
This important Class comprises the causes of 609 deaths (=22
per cent, of total deaths); including 170 of children under the
age of 5 years: 480 of the deaths were registered in the Town
sub.district, and 129 in Brampton.
Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatism of the Heart caused 11
deaths, six of them in the Brampton sub.district; Rheumatism,
four deaths, all in the Town sub.district. In fatal cases of
rheumatic fever the immediate cause of death, not unfrequently,
is disease of the heart arising in the course of the malady; and
of the deaths certified from heart disease at later periods of life,
not a few might properly be ascribed to rheumatism as the
primary cause. But the connexion between the two diseases is
either overlooked or, it may be, unknown to the certifying practitioner.
In the new classification, deaths due to rheumatic
disease involving the heart are distinguished from deaths due
to rheumatism without such complication. Gout was the cause
of 4 deaths, all in the Town sub.district, and Rickets of 3.
Cancer, Malignant Disease, was accountable for 128 deaths;
V6 in the Town sub.district, and 32 in Brampton. Cancer
appears to be on the increase in the country generally: possibly,
however, some portion of the increase in deaths classified to this
cause may be due to more accurate diagnosis. The deaths in
Kensington from this cause in the previous ten years, were 69,
88, 79, 95, 90, 112, 92, 128, 117 and 119. Deaths from cancer
are usually more numerous, proportionally to population, in the
Brampton sub.district, than in the relatively poorer Town sub.
district. Cancer, in fact, is quite as prevalent, probably even
more prevalent, amongst well.to.do people, than in the poorer