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These tables show that the death rate for the district is slightly
in excess, both for zymotic and other diseases, over the average rate
for the whole of London. I trust we shall see this reversed at some
future period.
ANNUAL BIRTH RATE.
The births during the year were 5255, being at the rate of 41.0
per thousand living, or one to every 24.3 of the population— the rate
for the whole of London in the corresponding period being 35.8, a
difference of 5.0 per thousand. It cannot be said that Bethnal Green
is not a prolific neighbourhood. Of these 5255 children born in the
parish, 878 died before attaining the age of one year; that is, at the
rate of 167.07 per thousand children born, or one child out of every
5.9 brought into the world dies before attaining the age of twelve
months— the corresponding rate for the whole of the metropolis being
158.8. This mortality, both for London and Bethnal Green, is very
much in excess of what it should be, and is, I believe, in a great
measure, attributable to the extreme ignorance prevalent amongst
mothers of the proper diet for young children.
Dr. West, in his " Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood,"
says :—
"The infant whose mother refuses to perform towards it a mother's part, or who
by accident, disease, or death, is deprived of the food that nature destined for it, too
often languishes and dies. Such children you may see with no fat to give plumpness
to their limbs; no red particles in their blood to impart a healthy hue to their skin ;
their face wearing in infancy the lineaments of age ; their voice a constant wail; their
whole aspect an embodiment of woe. But give to such children the food that nature
destined for them, the mournful cry will cease; the facc will assume a look of content;
by degrees, the features of infancy will disclose themselves; the limbs will
grow round; the skin, pure red and white ; and when at length we hear the merry
laugh of babyhood, it seems almost as if the little sufferer of some weeks before must
have been a changeling;—and this the real child brought back from fairyland."
Nature has provided a special food which contains in itself every
element necessary for the development and growth of the new-born
infant—milk, and more especially mothers'milk; the food to which
I allude also contains these elements in such a form as to be most
readily digested and assimilated by the delicate organs of the infant.
Assuredly, then, we cannot improve upon nature, and if we attempt to