Annual report on the health of the city for the year 1871 / W.T. Gairdner. and on the Operations of the Sanitary Department, for the year ending 30th April 1872 / by Kenneth M. Macleod.
- William Tennant Gairdner
- Date:
- 1872
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Annual report on the health of the city for the year 1871 / W.T. Gairdner. and on the Operations of the Sanitary Department, for the year ending 30th April 1872 / by Kenneth M. Macleod. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
25/98 (page 23)
![The contrast is undoubtedly a striking one, and does not become less so as the inquiry advances to the infantile death-rates; for here again it appears that between the best and the worst districts in the Table there is a difference which may be thus expressed— That while in Cranstonhill District 69 children under five years died in 1871 out of 1000 ascertained by the Census of that year to be the number living within that age, the corresponding number in the Bridgegate and Wynd was 189, and in the High Street (west) 188 per 1000 living. In other words, for every one infant funeral in Cranstonhill District, there must have been out of a like number living in 1871 not far from three infant funerals in these notoriously unhealthy districts in the central part of the City. And it will not fail to be observed, that in the two districts which the double test of the general and the infantile mortality establishes as having by far the highest death-rates in the City, the density of population, as compared with Cranstonhill, is in the one case more than ten times, in the other more than six times, as great as in the district which has the absolutely lowest death-rates, both of the infantile and of the general population. Thus fai-, therefore, the general laws which dominate the mortality of the selected districts of Glasgow appear to show very clearly the existence of certain unfavourable influences which act with nearly equal force upon the infantile and the more advanced ages, and which may be generally expressed as causing a much more than two-fold, nay, in the case of infants, nearly a three-fold mortality in some districts as compared with others. But this is not all; for it cannot be doubted, though by these Tables it cannot be numerically proved, that the contrast in reality is much greater than this. £]Were we to choose out the very best localities in Blythswood or Cranstonhill, and to compare them with the very worst in High Street or Bridgegate, there can be no doubt whatever that instead of a doubled or trebled, we should find a quadrupled or quintupled mortality in the latter as compared with the former. And there can be almost as little doubt that we should find these limited areas of frightfully great mortality occupied by a still more densely crowded population; it having been proved by careful inquiries that in some parts of the Central District 800 or 900 persons may be found living upon an acre of surface!^ Reverting for a moment now to the four groups of districts above-mentioned, in which the very large populations involved](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21467778_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
