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14
year 1860 was 1.94 per cent. a rate not higher than that of
the very healthiest of the preceding years of my tenure of
office, and less than that calculated by the Registrar General
for the current year for London as a whole, or for any one of
its five groups of districts We are then, I conceive, fairly
entitled to regard the year 1860 as one of the healthiest which
we have experienced (a fact confirmed by the Registrar
General's annual report), and equally entitled to maintain,
unless anything should appear in the details of the report to
invalidate this conclusion, that Camberwell continues to be
one of the healthiest parts of the Metropolis.
No doubt insanitary conditions influence the mortality of
many diseases which they do not cause; and produce in many
persons states of ill-health, which render life irksome or prevent
it from being profitably employed, but which do not
necessarily terminate in death. In reference to the latter
point, although I could indicate here and there localities in
which, judging from the Parochial Medical Officers' returns
and from other sources of information, non-fatal illnesses
due to such causes have arisen, I feel bound on the whole to
assert that sickness thus produced has been far from generally
prevalent. And in reference to the former point, I may remark
that the deleterious influence of insanitary conditions on
the event of diseases would be indicated and judged of by
increased heaviness of general mortality, and that its absence
on the other hand must be assumed, when, as in our case on
the present occasion, the mortality tables are unusually light.
Nor does the satisfactory inference which the above considerations
tend to establish diminish in force, when tested by
a more minute analysis of the Tables appended to this report.
The chief further points on which our estimate must be
grounded are, 1st, The state of infantile mortality, and 2nd,
The prevalenoe or non-prevalence of epidemic and endemic
diseases.