View report page

31
ages at which it is most apt to succumb to those diseases.
It furnishes, at the same time, a very fair indication
of the measure of health and comfort enjoyed by the
lower-middle and working classes of such a population.
The diseases to which I especially refer are small-pox,
measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping-cough,
diarrhoea, want of breast-milk, thrush, scrofula, tabes
mesenterica, hydrocephalus, convulsions, diseases of the
respiratory organs, atrophy, and debility.
As some of these diseases are propagated by
contagion, and are therefore preventible, while others are
due to privation, their occurrence in most instances
implies want of care in guarding against their
inception, or inability, from lack of accommodation, to
prevent their extension, or want of means to provide
the comforts and remedial measures which are necessary
to arrest their development.
It shows that, of such a population, 413 die during
the first year of their existence. At this age the precise
causes of death are often obscure. The patient can
give no information. The objective symptoms alone
aid us in our diagnosis; and what we often call the
disease—convulsions, diarrhoea, thrush, &c.,—is only the
most prominent symptom. The deaths at this age
mostly belong to the zymotic, the local, and the
developmental classes.
The zymotic diseases, when fully developed, are in
general readily recognizable in infants.
Not so the local. The organs themselves are in a
transitional state from that of foetal to that of breathing
life. They are in process of development. The struggles