View report page

22
stated, or else would be only a repetition of what we have already learned from the
death-returns. But in the case of Ague the Workhouse practice furnishes cur only
guide. This disease is rarely registered as a cause of death, and its localization cannot
therefore be studied from the Registrar General's records. It appears that in
1858 Ague was confined to the very poorest places, Church Lane and Lincoln Court
being the two chief; for this we should be prepared, by what has gone before. A few,
but nowise the majority, of the cases were among the inmates of common lodging houses
The diminution which I have been able to record, in the number of patients
admitted into the parish infirmary, taken with the fall we have seen in the death rate
of the district, must be regarded as a most satisfactory circumstance in an (Economic
as well as in a purely sanitary point of view. It may be roughly stated that one
quarter of the whole number of paupers are thrown upon the poor's rates, as the direct
result of illness, and more than another quarter of the whole by the loss of the heads of
families by death. To diminish sickness, therefore, is at once to diminish pauperism.
I should disdain to calculate the money amount which is saved to the rate-payers by
every decrease in the disease and in the mortality of St. Giles's, and I know that in
this district, no such inducement to a humane and far-sighted policy is needed. Rut
it is worth while to point out how, in acting energetically from unselfish and higher
motives, we are practising the most direct œconomy to ourselves, as well as fulfilling a
sacred duty to our poorer fellow men.
The Bloomsbury Dispensary, in 1858, afforded relief to 2618 patients, 1895
of whom were attended by the physician, and 723 by the surgeon. Of these, 49.1
were visited at their own homes, and of the whole number only 54 died. A statement
of the number and nature of the principal zymotic diseases, in the practice of this
dispensary, with the localities in which they occurred, is given in the following table,
in which, as before, allowance must be made for patients seeking relief at the source
nearest to them.

* Under scarlatina are included three cases where the disease resembled diphtheritis.
A ease of ague occurred in Charles Street (H), not in a common lodging house.