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65
As their strength declines, these consumptive patients are compelled to seek a home in
the workhouse, and there they die. Chronic Bronchitis and some incurable brain
diseases, follow the like rule.
A few suicides add to the number of deaths referred to these houses, but none
of those unexplained deaths of children, which occasionally have excited sad suspicion,
have been registered as occurring in common lodging houses.
The mortality and disease in the Model Lodging Houses have been as follows,
for 1857:—
In the Streatham Street buildings, there have been five deaths, four of which
were in young children, two from whooping-cough. The death-rate on the population—as
far as it is fair to deduce it from such small numbers—was therefore only 15
per thousand, better that is than Bloomsbury, and more than twice as good as the
Southern portion of St Giles.
In these model lodging houses any zymotic disease would probably come under
the notice of the Officer of Health; it is gratifying to him to state that among the large
number of children and others living here, he has only heard of six cases of disease of
this class during the year, including the two deaths from whooping-cough.
Among the tenants of the houses in Wild Court there was a much larger mortality.
Eleven deaths which occured there represent a death-rate of 31.4 in a thousand, a
very much smaller rate than that of the sub-district in which the Court is placed, but
still it is larger than the average of St. Giles.*
Of these eleven deaths, five were from zymotic diseases whooping-cough, two;
measles, two; and the other scarlatina. Four of these five, however, happened among
two families. No death from Wild Court appears on the books of the workhouse, but
one was ascertained from the register of Charing Cross Hospital. Besides the deaths, I
have accounts of nine other cases of zymotic disease in this court. Five of them were
in one house, and three in another, this latter house having also given a death from
measles, and another from scarlet fever.
In the improved houses of Clark's Buildings there were, in 1857, twenty
deaths, seventeen registered at the houses, and three occurring in hospitals; nine of
these were from consumption and lung diseases, chiefly of the chronic kind; seven
were from zymotic maladies, and comprise two of whooping-cough which died at
the Children's Hospital, two of scarlatina, one of measles, one of fever, and one
of diarrhoea in an infant. I have also memoranda of 16 other diseases of this
class which did not prove fatal.
Such maladies as these, with the enormously high general death-rate, (in
so far as they are not accidental for the one year) may be partly accounted for by
the absence of all efficient supervision to the houses, which were dirty and
* In spite of the precautions taken by the Society which owns these houses, the privies
and dust-bins of this Court were sometimes found sadly misused. The same was even more
positively the case last year in Clark's Buildings,