[Report 1898] / Medical Officer of Health, Surrey County Council.

  • Surrey (England). County Council.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1898] / Medical Officer of Health, Surrey County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/142 (page 13)
    rates of 150 and upwards. They include the large towns of Richmond with Barnes, Wimbledon, and Kingston, together with the smaller districts of Malden, Dorking, Gfodalming, Leatherhead, and Carshalton. The records of the Registrar- Greneral, published year after year, show that in certain manu¬ facturing districts of England the average Infant Mortality is as high as 170-180. This excessive death-rate is attributed to the absence of maternal care resulting from the engagement of child-bearing women in factory work. In some instances the death-rate of towns has been observed to stand still and even to rise in spite of the generally improving sanitary circum¬ stances. Careful investigation in such cases has shown that a considerable fall in the death-rate of adults has synchronised with a marked rise in the infant death-rate, the whole result being expressed by a nearly stationary death-rate when all ages are included. The conditions of life are of course very different in the manufacturing towns to those prevailing in the South of England, and, therefore, reasons of this kind can not be said to apply to the populations of Richmond and Kingston. The subject is clearly one for thorough local investigation and report. The column of “Infant Death-rates” is in close connection, and should be “ read into ” those headed respectively “ Zymotic ” and “ Respiratory ” diseases. It frequently happens that the autumn epidemic of Diarrhoea (Cholera Infantum) is fatal from want of early attention to cases. And the same is true with Measles, Whooping, and that illness which assumes such protean forms —Influenza. Indeed, in the case of Measles, the forecast depends chiefly on the character of the house accommodation, medical attention, and skill in