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2
Summer Diarrhœa.
The Zymotic deaths are made high by an addition of the
Diarrhoea cases (51) 49 of which are as usual in young children.
The Summer Diarrhœa of young children is dependent more
upon the relaxing and predisposing influences of warm weather,
than upon Local unsanitary conditions of their surroundings.
In Summer months, a relaxed state of the mucous membrane
of the bowels causes about as many deaths in young
children, as the effects of cold produce in the severe Winter
months upon the infantile population.
Large numbers of sickly and weakly children abound in the
tenant houses of our thickly populated streets, their mothers are
themselves badly nourished, and deficient in natural breast milk;
artificial feeding is resorted to by many nurses who are grossly
ignorant of infantile management ; this ignorance on the part of
those who have the care of children, is the chief source of that
form of gastric irritation which prevails in warm weather, and
in a few days often proves fatal.
In Summer, the digestive organs readily suffer; in Winter it
is the respiratory organs that become attacked. In summer
months, whilst only half a dozen fatal cases of Bronchitis are
recorded, about ten times that number of deaths occur from the
Alvine-flux, or Summer Diarrhoea. In Winter, the figures are
just reversed—70 to 80 deaths are the usual mortality from
bronchitis and inflammation of the respiratory organs in young
children, and there is no fatal Diarrhœa.

(1) Rheumatic Fever.
(2) Typhus.
(3) Tonsilitis.
(4) Aptha.