Premature death : its promotion or prevention.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Premature death : its promotion or prevention. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    part, the changes of natural and often premature decay. On the other hand, the fatal diseases of the nervous system in infancy and early childhood are, in a large proportion of cases, the indications of an immaturity or defective vitality or original vice of organisation related to the class of developmental diseases so called, which we shall have next to refer to. At the best, the mobile and impressible nervous system of the infant responds to exterior influences and impressions in a manner very different from that commonly observed later in life. Morbid conditions, which, in late childhood, in youth, and in manhood, are manifested by shiverings, appear in the infant to be manifested by convulsions. But the question that most concerns us here is that the prevalences of diseases manifested by brain symptoms in infancy and early childhood, especially the prevalence of convulsions, is obviously influenced by certain local insanitary con- ditions. The rate of mortality from diseases of the nervous system, including hydrocephalus, ranges in England from 675 per 100,000 living under five years of age in the least unhealthy districts of the kingdom, to 1456 in the North-Western Counties, and 1504 in London. The most striking instance of the influence of local insanitary conditions upon excessive local prevalences of these diseases is obtained from what is known of the effects of a vitiated state of the atmosphere in promoting