A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864.

  • Trench, William Stewart, 1809-1877.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    5/16 (page 6)
    ‘ demic is supposed to exhaust the numbers of the unprotected, and 3 a lapse of time to be required before fresh victims are collected for ' the harvest of sickness and death. But this, though not altogether fallacious, is certainly not the whole truth. If we analyse the ■a registry of measles we find that in 1858 there died 206 children ^ between the ages of one and two, and 198 between those of two and ’ , five., a vast proportion of whom must not only have been unprotecterl ii in 1857 (the year of comparative quietude) but must also have been ?, in that period of life which is very subject to the infiuences of con- )f tagion. The same may be said of scarlatina, many of whose victims in 1861 and 1862 must have lived through 1860, It is not from 0 want of aliment that such diseases cease their ravages. This might 1 account for their temporary migration from a court, a street, or even ! I one district of a town to another, but not for their torpidity amidst 1,, an ever-changing population of 500,000 souls. Nor can any satis- factory explanation of the phenomena be obtained from variations 1 of physical causation ; for in Liverpool the vigilance of the Inspec- , tors had remained unabated in bad as in good years, while the pecu- I liarities of place and condition, the sanitary defects, and the exciting ) causes of constitutional derangement, were the same. 1 There are apparent in the statistics of the ten years some curious facts, but whether coincidences or bearing toward each other the relationship of cause and effect, must be determined on a wider field of inquiry. 1st. Small-pox was least prevalent in the third or September quarters, when the range of the thermometer is highest. It was I most prevalent in the first and second quarters of 1858, and 1 almost absent during the second and third quarters of 1861. I The mean heat during the former periods was 48*5 ; during the latter i 57.4; the range of the barometer and due point difference being . almost identical, and the only other difference being amount and duration of rain, which was greatest in 1861. As we know from experience that a high degree of atmospheric iheat soon exhausts the power of the vaccine-pox, it may be a reasonable question to ask whether the virulence of the contagion of small-pox in the clothes of patients is not weakened b}^ summer heat, and one mode of its propagation thereby lessened. The greatest number of the sufierers from small-pox weie children