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9
Deaths from simple old age, it will be seen, were happily still rather more
common in St. Giles than would be anticipated. Violent deaths were considerably
more frequent last year than they should be; the quota for the population of St.
Giles is 38, the registered number is 41. Eight persons dying in hospitals being
added, there is an excess of eleven such deaths. These, however, are accounted for
in a mass, by the loss of sixteen lives, in the Gilbert-street fire, in the first quarter of
the year.
Passing from diseases in excess to those which have been less prevalent in St.
Giles than elsewhere, we have the great satisfaction of meeting with the important class of
zymotic diseases. These diseases, it will be remembered, have been in strange excess
in London generally: they are in defect in St. Giles's. Thus the case of 1857 is
precisely reversed. In lieu of a quota for its population of 100 deaths from these
complaints, St. Giles, in 1857, gave 124. In lieu of a similar quota for 1858, St.
Giles's gives only 83. Relatively to the metropolis, the mortality from this class of
maladies has fallen from one year to the other, in the proportion of three to two. Even
in actual numbers, the decrease is considerable, from 332 in 1857, to 276 in
1858.
The diseases whose subsidence has produced this fall in the relative zymotic
mortality of St. Giles's, are measles, whooping-cough, and diarrhoea, all of which were
unduly fatal in 1857. Measles n that year killed 59 children; in 1858, only 25.
The former number represents twice the quota of deaths for its year, while the 25
deaths of 1858 were little more than half the estimated number of deaths for the St.
Giles population.* Whooping-cough destroyed 98 and 51 children in the two years
respectively, the estimated number in each case having been 52 and 54. Diarrhoea
fell from 78 deaths to 35, while the population of St. Giles would have afforded in the
two seasons, 64 and 42 deaths. Scarlatina, on the other hand, has increased in St.
Giles's, from 32 to 79, (or, with two hospital cases, 81); but this increase is strictly
proportionate to that which has characterized the year 1858, in the whole of London.
Among these 81 deaths are included 10 from diphtherias, a disease whose epidemics
have long been known to the world of medicine. Distinct from scarlatina on the one
side, and from croup on the other, this disease is nevertheless liable to be confounded with
these complaints. By the Registrar General, it was last year included with scarlatina
and perhaps little is gained at present by separating them in his returns. Continued
fever, including under this head, typhus, typhoid, and infantile remittent fever, has
been a little under the estimated number in the two years alike. There was remarkably
little of this disease in London in 1858, and what there was, was nearly all typhoid—
the Paris type of continued fever—which is believed to be especially generated by bad
drainage.
One disease of the zymotic class, however, has been very prevalent in St.
Giles's, as well as in other parts of London. Seven deaths from Small-pox, in St.
Giles's, are notably more than its share of the 247 which occurred in the metropolis in
* Measles attained its maximum prevalence in London in the early months of 1858;
in St. Giles's it culminated earlier than in other districts, whence the chief explanation of the
above.