General report on the sanitary condition of the town of Kelso / drawn up at the request of the Board of Commissioners of Police, by Charles Wilson, M.D.

Wilson, Charles, 1804-1883

Date:: 1848

Credit: General report on the sanitary condition of the town of Kelso / drawn up at the request of the Board of Commissioners of Police, by Charles Wilson, M.D. 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.

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$Average duration of li in different classes. fe origin woiikl, at least in as far as Kelso wari coucerncd, bo \'ery seriously inipugnod. liut wo learn, that fevers constituted then, at an average, 26.70 percent., or more than a fourth, of all clisoa.ses coming under treatment; wliile in some of the years the in-oportiou rose to a greatly higher extent. Of this amount, 14.05 were cases of ague, and 12.71 of continued fever. Let us now take another deceanium, from 1820 to 1839, when luihllo cleanliness was more respected, and the marshes, though still excoptionahle, had boon extensively drained ; and we find ague all but annihilated, and the nmount of continued fever reduced to 7.3G per cent., or less than u thirteenth of the general amount of sickness. Nor is our gain in the later dcccnnium limited to this immense reduction. Tlie viru- lence of every form of disease appears to have received a corres- ponding mitigation; and the mortality, which, in the first decennium, amounted to -1.6 per cent, of every description of sickness, fell to somewhat under 2.6 per cent, in the second. Scrofulous disorders, as might have been anticipated, were found to have been greatly more ])revalent in the former period than in the latter. To these statements, which have been deduced from materials supjilied by the general record of the Kelso Dispensary, and which, of course, relate to tlie labouring and poorer classes exclusively, I would here add a few others, bearing reference to the average duration of life, as shown by the ages at the period of death, in two distinct classes, existing contemporaneously, but under cii cum- stances of unequal advantage with respect to hygienic conditions. The interval selected is again one of ten years, terminating with Juno, 1S47 ; and the materials are derived from the recorded results of my own individual practice during that period. In con- stituting the classes, I have adopted the simple arrangement of placing in the one category all those who were in the habit of receiving gratuitous medical assistance, and whoso command, there- fore, of the comforts of life, and of sanitary advantages in their residences, might be naturally considered, as it really was, of a very limited description ; in the other, I have arranged those whose more independent circumstances placed them in a greatly superior ]X)sition, with respect to nearly all those conditions of Itealth usually held to constitute the ground of sanitary enquiry. In the first of these classes, then, I find that the average duration of life was 34 years : in the second, it was 44 years and 1-3 weeks. In the first, half the number had perished before the thirty-first year : in the second, half were existing beyond the fiftieth. In the first, only 14 per cent.; in the second, as many as 33 per cent., outlived the term of sixty-five. At eighty-five, 1 per cent, remained in the first class, and 3 in the second. At ninety, one only survived of each. Thus, while one hundi'od of the class possessing the minor advantages lived only an aggregate of 3400 years, the same number of that which was more favourably situated as to sanitary conditions$