'Ticketed houses' of Glasgow : with an interrogation of the facts for guidance towards the amelioration of the lives of their occupants / by James B. Russell.

  • Russell, James Burn, 1837-1904.
Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: 'Ticketed houses' of Glasgow : with an interrogation of the facts for guidance towards the amelioration of the lives of their occupants / by James B. Russell. 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.

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    In 1877, in a paper On the Comparative Prevalence of Filth Diseases in Town and Country, which I read to this Society, I said—I believe that if you were to classify the whole population of the city according as they occupied houses of one, two, three, four, five, or more apartments, and then to ascertain the aggregate death-rate from all causes in each class ... it would have its maximum in the population living in one-apartment houses, and fall in gradations to a minimum among those who inhabited the largest houses. In that paper I submitted the death-rates among the inhabitants thus classified from diphtheria, croup, enteric fever, and diarrhoea, calculated for three and a-ha]f years. At that time no similar investigation had been made. The nearest was a classification of the inhabitants of Barmen according to income, which brought out a mortality of 34| per 1,000 among persons having an income of less than £30; of 19 among persons whose income was from £30 to £75; of 18 among persons whose income was from £75 to £150; and of 16| above £150. Recently the Medical Officer of Dundee has constructed a table of the mortality statistics of that town for 1884, which shows that the death-rate of the inhabitants of houses of one and two rooms was 23 3; of three-room houses, 17*2; of four-room houses and upwards, 12 3—while the general death-rate of Dundee was 20'7. This year, in Edinburgh, an investigation of the death-rate on the basis of rental has been commenced. The results for the first half of the year are as follow:—Under £5, death-rate per 1,000 \ inhabitants, 23; £5 and under £10, 21-34; £10 and under £15, 20-1; £15 and under £20, 15-86; £20 and under £30, 14-1; £30 and under £40, 18-8; £40 and under £50, 13-16; £50 and upwards, 14*76—the general death-rate for the same period being 19. It is premature to draw inferences from these data; but the basis of rental is not so good as that of size of house. Whatever hygienic meaning more extended statistics on this basis 'may possess must depend iipon the relation of rental to the air-space or house-room which it represents, and, therefore, it would be better at once to take the house-room as the basis. Before submitting the results of an investigation of the mortality statistics of the inhabitants of Glasgow for 1885, according to the size of the houses ^^hich they occupied, let me say a word on the difficulties of such investigations. It is necessary that the residence of every deceased person sliall be