View report page

or a total at all ages of 104. This gives us a tubercular death
Rate of 4.22 per 1,000 living. This is sad reading, representing
as it does one of the highest tubercular death rates of any
district in London. The high rents, the rapidly decreasing
number of houses fit for habitation, cause an overcrowding to
an extent with which it is difficult to know how to deal. For
all practical purposes it is impossible to get a conviction for
overcrowding before a South London magistrate; the pitiable
tales revealed by the defendants, in many cases quite true, of
the impossibility to obtain houseroom elsewhere for a sum
within their means, induce the magistrates to postpone the case
from week to week and month to month, so that, except in
some very flagrant case, no conviction can be obtained. This
matter is one to which I have given my attention for many
years past, and I become more and more convinced that the
matter is not one for the local authorities. The real remedy,
and one which will have to be adopted sooner or later, consists
in large municipal schemes for the housing of the poor, carried
out in a suburb to which there would be day and night services
of trams and trains at cheap fares. There is some gleam of
hope to be derived from the knowledge that the public are
beginning more and more to realize the infectious nature of
consumption, and we have arranged to ask permission of the
friends to disinfect the rooms and clothing of the deceased, in
houses where deaths occur.
The influence of food in the propagation of tuberculosis
came prominently before your Board in a recommendation from
the London County Council in the latter part of last year, asking
for the Board's cohesion to their plan for abolishing private
slaughter-houses in favour of public abattoirs and competent
officials to supervise them.
The matter was referred to your Sanitary Committee, by
whom I was instructed to report on the subject. I went carefully
and exhaustively into the subject of slaughter-houses, both
53
TUBERCULOSIS.