The realities of medical attendance on the sick children of the poor in large towns / by T.P. Heslop.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The realities of medical attendance on the sick children of the poor in large towns / by T.P. Heslop. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    in the interval averaging 67 per 1,000 of the mean numbers living. The mortality in the first year after birth is at the rate of 165; in the second, 65.6; in the third, 36.1; in the fourth, 24.3 per 1,000, living at those ages. A more minute subdivision of infantile existence shows that the mortality in the first month of life is at the annual rate of 571 per 1,000, in the second month 218, and so on. The deaths in thirty large town-districts in the ten years 1851-60, of chil- dren under five years of age, were 338,990. If the mortality in these towns had been no higher than in the healthy districts of England, the deaths would only have amounted to 135,470; consequently, there was an excess of 203,520 deaths justly ascribable to preventable causes. The most recent returns show that the proportion of deaths under five years of age in England is 41 per cent, of the total; but in London it is 43 per cent., and even higher than that in some of the northern counties. In some of the metropolitan districts more than 50 per cent, of the deaths in 1865 were of children under five years of age. In his supplement to the twenty-fifth annual Report of the Registrar-General, Dr. Farr gives the proportion of deaths to the population at different ages in every registra- tion district, from which it appears that the average annual rate of mortality per 1,000 in the ten years 1851-60, of children under five years of age, amounted to 66.9 in Isling- ton, and arrived at 101.5 in East London; 102.5 in White- chapel ; 108.5 in St. Gilesh The two highest rates of death are for Manchester, 117.3; and Liverpool, 132.0. Further evidence is adduced in the admirable paper read in this Section at Oxford last year, by Dr. Morgan. He quotes the Sanitary Reports on the State of Salford, for seven consecutive years, extending from 1860 to 1866, with the view of shewing that some districts are far more trying to early life than others. Here 49.9 per cent, of the deaths