[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell].

  • St. Giles Camberwell (Parish : Surrey, England)
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: City of London, London Metropolitan Archives

    31/86 (page 29)
    29 vices of constitution, from consumption, cancer, and many other chronic forms of disease. On the effects of the second class of causes however I have something to say, especially as I believe that they have a very important influence, and that this influence has been very generally overlooked. The in fluence of hospitals, of asylums and of workhouses and of any institution receiving the aged and sick is well illustrated in the present report, by the excessive mortality which the pre sence of the workhouse and of two lunatic asylums gives to the sub-district of Camberwell. But it may happen in another way that, by a kind of process of natural selection, the young and able-bodied tend to accumulate in certain localities, while the infants and the aged, and it may be the sickly, remain in undue proportion in other localities. To illustrate this: the death-rate of Dulwich has always been remarkably low; the death-rate of Peckham, without being really remarkably high, has always been by contrast remarkably high, and it has been assumed that therefore Dulwich is far more healthy than Peckham. I believe Dulwich to be very healthy; I know that Peckham, in its low-lying parts, has many elements of un healthiness; but I do not for one moment believe that the differ ence of their death-rates indicates a corresponding difference in their healthiness, still less of course that the excess of its death-rate is a measure of the degree in which diseases, preventible by the action of the Vestry, prevail in Peckham. I have said on former occasions, and I repeat it now, that there is in many parts of Peckham a large poor population ; that amongst such a population children get neglected and die of illnesses, from which under other conditions they would doubtless have recovered; that from their habits of life contagi ous diseases spread among them with far greater virulence than they do among the so-called better classes, and that illnesses are manufactured amongst them which those who live in different