The prevention of epidemics : and the construction and management of isolation hospitals / by Roger McNeill, M.D. Edin.

  • McNeill, Roger.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of epidemics : and the construction and management of isolation hospitals / by Roger McNeill, M.D. Edin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    ages, bring partly dependent on the expectation of life, and very low in infancy on account of the large death-rate under 5 years of age. On Dr. Farr's basis the child of an agricultural labourer is worth only ^5 at birth, £56 at the age of five, £nj at the age of ten, ^192 at the age of fifteen, increasing to ^246 at the age of twenty-five, then steadily declining to only £1 at the age of seventy, while at eighty the cost of future maintenance is greater than the earnings by £41.x The 7778 deaths per annum in Scotland from zymotic diseases occurred at various ages. If, how- ever, the half of that number be taken as males and multiplied by ^150 (the mean value of each member of the male population), the economical loss to the community will be found to amount to a considerable sum. A still greater economical loss to the com- munity is caused by the preventible sickness and mortality from fifteen to forty-five years of age. Trusting to Farr's English Life Tables, of 1,000,000 children born, 72,397 die between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.2. . . Premature death is an evil and a loss to the state, but sickness is, from an economical aspect, a still greater evil ; for sickness adds an 1 Newsholme's Vital Statistics, p. 14. 2 By them [infectious diseases] ami by other causes, out of IOOO children born in Liverpool, 518 were destroyed in the first ten years of their life, some by smallpox, many by measles, scarlet fever, whooping-cough, typhus and enteric fever. Out of 1000 children born in London, 351 die under ten years of age by zymotic diseases and other causes. In the healthy districts of England, out of 1000 children born, 205 die in the first ten years of life.—Farr's Statistics, {'■ 3^7-
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