The elements of vital statistics / by Arthur Newsholme.

  • Newsholme, Arthur, Sir, 1857-1943.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The elements of vital statistics / by Arthur Newsholme. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    57/380 (page 43)
    arm}'' and navy, where every case of sickness is tabulated as to character, duration, and result. Such a complete system is im- practicable in civil life, and we will content ourselves with a series of proposals of what may be reasonably attempted so far as the general population is concerned. This necessitates a short previous discussion of the scope of preventive medicine. To contend that preventive medicine is limited in its scope by the so-called zymotic diseases, is to rob it of its most important and promising field of work. Zymotic diseases * in the five years 1891-95 caused an average annual death-rate of 2757 per milHon living. In the same period rheumatic fever and rheumatism of the heart were responsible for an average death-rate of 88 per million; endocarditis and pericarditis, which in a vast preponder- ance of cases are caused by rheumatism, causing a death-rate of 333 per million; while tubercular diseases caused a death-rate of 2123 per million (phthisis being responsible for 1464 of this); and bronchitis and pneumonia caused a death-rate of 3329 per million. Of the zymotic diseases a death-rate of 806 per million was caused by measles and whooping-cough collectively, of 415 per million by influenza, and of 652 per million by diarrhoea and cholera. None of these is included in the scope of compulsory notification of infectious diseases as enforced in the majority of districts; and although it may be doubted Avhether any immediate practical benefit would arise from such notification, the improved knowledge of their natural history and causation, which would gradually accumulate, must in the end prepare the way for more effective preventive measures. At present, with the jDOssible exception of summer diarrhoea, it may be said of these diseases that the sanitary measures already adopted in this country have produced but little, if any, effect. If we omit these diseases, there remains a death-rate of 884 per million due to infectious diseases, the spread .of some of which has been seriously combated by sanitary authorities. The total annihilation of the latter diseases would only have reduced the general death-rate, in 1891-95, from 18-74 to 17-86 per 1000; while the annihilation of tubercular diseases, which is much more Avithin the range of possibility, and may in fact be accomplished, like the already secured annihilation as an endemic disease of the closely allied disease leprosy in this * Including small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, typhus, enteric and con- tinued fever, whooping-cough, influenza, cholera, diarrha2a, malaria, hydro- phobia and other zoogenous diseases, venereal diseases, erysipelas, jmerperal fever, and other septic diseases.