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certain forms of disease than by mere variations of death-rate;
although no doubt a large, and especially an increasing, deathrate
is a matter to arrest attention and to demand inquiry.
Thus if, in a certain place, ague prevails, we know it to be unhealthy
from the presence of marsh miasm; if cholera or
typhoid fever prevails in a locality, we have good reason to believe
that in that locality the atmosphere or the water is unduly
impregnated with the poison of cesspools or of sewers; if
typhus fever breaks out, there is ground to suspect that the
population among whom it appears are overcrowded, their houses
filthy and insufficiently ventilated. But it does not necessarily
follow that the presence or the spread of such diseases proves
Local insalubrity; many of them are infectious, and if introduced
into a crowded neighbourhood will spread in it however
otherwise healthy that neighbourhood may be. The prevalence
of any of them, however, in a markedly aggravated form, or for
an unusually long period, renders the presence of local causes
of insalubrity exceedingly probable. Now there are certain diseases,
which the Registrar General terms zymotic; the class
includes those diseases which more than any others are supposed
to measure local salubrity or insalubrity. Let us take
the most important of these, and see how, in regard to them,
Camberwell, Peckham and London stand in comparison with
one another. The appended Table has been devised with this
object.
In calculating this Table, it must be understood that I have
taken the numbers of deaths as they are given by the Registrar
General himself for 53 weeks;* that I have adopted the
Thus, he assigns 50 deaths in Camberwell to fever; I estimate the number
of fever-deaths at 41 only. But as the same kind of error which leads
him to increase the fever-deaths in Camberwell, doubtless leads him also to