View report page

10
The deaths of illegitimate children under five years of
age, 87,118, and 119, in the preceding three years respectively,
were 119 in 1892 (males 69, and females 50), of which 114
were registered in the Town sub-district, and were equal to
65.7 percent. on births registered as illegitimate. Of these
119 children, 33 only outlived their first year; 28 died in the
second, and 4 in the third year of life. The causes of death,
as registered, were atrophy, debility, and inanition, 21; premature
birth, 10; tubercular diseases, 13; zymotic diseases,
24 (measles, 10; whooping cough, 8; and diarrhoea, 6);
syphilis, 1; lung diseases, 33; convulsions, 4; diseases of
the digestive organs, 4; violence, 4 (accidental suffocation,
3, and fracture of the skull, 1); want of breast milk, 3; and one
each from want of attention at birth, and erysipelas. Illegitimate
children are commonly brought up by hand under the
charge of strangers. The evidence of improper feeding, and
of the lack of maternal care, is apparent enough in the above
list of the causes of death. "Want of breast milk" might
probably have been fairly assigned as the cause of many
more than the three deaths classified to it" in medical certificates.
SENILE MORTALITY.
At sixty years of age and upwards, there were 880 deaths,
against 727, 826, and 957 in the preceding three years; they
were equivalent to 30.5 per cent, on total deaths, the
equivalent percentage in London as a whole, being 24.9.