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operation is performed. Hence children not born in these parishes will appear on the
vaccination-registers of St. Giles and Bloomsbury, if they have been vaccinated at any
institution, or at the house of any practitioner in the district; and conversely, children
born in St. Giles, and vaccinated outside the district, will not appear in the vaccination
books of the St. Giles Registrars. This want of correspondence between the births
and successful vaccinations, prevents any conclusion from being drawn as to the extent
to which the law is obeyed.
Thus in the three years, 1856-8, the vaccinations registered in St. Giles and
Bloomsbury were, 1769, 1825, and 1927, the last number being about 70 larger than
the births of the year; these numbers, too, it will be seen, are on the increase, while
the number of births remains nearly stationary.
The poor are vaccinated gratuitously, not only at the Workhouse, but at the
Bloomsbury Dispensary, and at the institutions of other districts, certainly of St.
Pancras, and perhaps elsewhere. While the total number of registered vaccinations
has been increasing, there has been a slight decrease in the cases operated on by the
Medical Officers of the Workhouse.
On making actual inquiry, it is found, however, that there is a number of
children who have never been vaccinated at all. These cases have been noticed
most in the Coram Street locality, perhaps because the question has been more carefully
asked there.
Chapter III.—Peculiarities, Physical and Social, of the different parts of
St. Giles District.
For registration purposes, St. Giles is divided into three sub-districts: St.
George, Bloomsbury, the parish; St. Giles, South, that part of St. Giles in the Fields,
to the south of a line along the middle of Holbom and Broad Street, and to the east
of a line along the middle of Great and Little St. Andrew's Street; St. Giles, North,
the part of the parish not comprised in the foregoing.
These three districts differ one from the other in many very important respects;
I shall enumerate them as briefly as possible.
St. George, Bloomsbury comprises 112 acres, whose average elevation is
71 feet; St. Giles, South, has 63 acres, at an elevation of 64 feet; St. Giles, North,
has 60 acres, whose height above high water mark is 68 feet.
A small portion of Bloomsbury, at the extreme eastern angle, is, I believe, the
only exception to the uniform gravel soil of the district; here the clay comes to the
surface. In this locality, to the east of a line along Woburn Place, there are no
public pumps. Another part of the district which should be mentioned as wanting
pumps, is Lincoln's Inn Fields.
The uninhabited open spaces are distributed as follows:—In Bloomsbury,
about 24 acres; in St. Giles, South, 10 acres; in St. Giles, North, 4 acres. These
will have to be taken into account in stating the density of the population.
Each of the three registration sub-districts comprises a good and a bad class of
house?, and hence, though perhaps the best division that could be made, the features