On the progress of preventive medicine during the Victorian era : being the inaugural address delivered before the Epidemiological Society of London, session 1887-88 / by R. Thorne Thorne.

Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the progress of preventive medicine during the Victorian era : being the inaugural address delivered before the Epidemiological Society of London, session 1887-88 / by R. Thorne Thorne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    removed by the passing of the Act for the Civil Eegistration of Deaths, as well as of births and marriages. There had, indeed, been some partial registration of deaths since the date of Queen Elizabeth; the London weekly Bills of Mortality, first commenced in 1593, had been uninterruptedly continued from 1603 to 1831; but the system gradually became less rather than more efficient. Even before 1593 certain records had been kept which chronicled the periodic devastations of this country by famines and epidemics; black death, sweating sickness, and plague being prominent amongst the latter. Later on came other records, medical and historical, supplying information, more or less inexact and incomplete, as to large and often sustained mortalities from small-pox, scarlet fever, influenza, and what appeared to be typhus and diph- theria, as well as from other allied epidemic diseases. The last of these epidemics was due to cholera, which made its first appearance in the United Kingdom in October 1831, and fi'om which, in the following year, many thousands perished. But no registration of the causes of death existed at the time, and hence, although 52,547 cholera deaths were heard of from various sources as having occurred in the United Kingdom during that epidemic, yet the actual extent of cholera fatality remained unknown. Such statistical in- formation as was available up to 1837 was all but useless for scientific purposes; death-rates were calculated on no certain data, and their significance was correspondingly open to ques- tion. The first requisite to a proper understanding of the etiology of disease was wanting, and epidemics were looked upon as enveloped in inscrutable mystery, and as far beyond human control. But, in 1837, better machinery for the compilation of vital statistics was provided; and when Dr. William Farr entered the office of the Eegistrar-General of England, in ]839, those first steps were taken to secure such classification and grouping