[Report 1913] / Medical Officer of Health, Nottingham City.

  • Nottingham (England). City Council.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1913] / Medical Officer of Health, Nottingham City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    75/208 (page 71)
    Diarrhoea.—The difference between my total of deaths from diarrhoea and enteritis, and that furnished by the Registrar-General, as already stated, is due to the fact that the Registrar-General now includes in such category only deaths under 2 years, whereas my figures embrace diarrhoea deaths at all ages. The difference between the totals is numerically slight, because although many cases occur after the second year, the case mortality is exceedingly low. The Registrar-General’s total will be adopted whenever reference is made to other figures of similar character prepared on a uniform basis by that authority, but in my various tables prepared from death returns in the course of the year, and in other places when referring to the diarrhoea mortality of Nottingham from a purely local standpoint, I shall adhere to my own total. The total of 220 deaths (152 from diarrhoea and 68 from enteritis), though large in comparison with the corresponding figures for 1912 and 1910, viz., 87 and 96 respectively, was practically identical with the annual average of the 10 years ending with 1912 (219-2), and equal to only one-half the total for 1911, which was a typical diarrhoea year with sustained high summer and autumn temperature and low rainfall. Epidemic diarrhoea, as we know it in modern civilized countries with warm summers, is peculiarly a disease of dense urban districts (urban districts in England and Wales have a death-rate from this cause more than twice that of rural areas). It is to a large extent dependent upon the following factors for its propagation, viz., poverty or social degradation, over¬ crowding and dirt, hand-feeding, and (by way of spark to an explosive mixture) heat and drought. The effective cause is a microbe, and invisible, but the