Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham].

  • Amariah Brigham
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    119/166 (page 113)
    oF life of a Roman citizen, from the time of Servius Tullius to Justinian, was thirty years; but, according to Mr. Finlaison, the expectation of life for the easy classes of England is 1 in 50, and for the whole mass of the population, 1 in 45. England is superior in salubrity to any other country in Europe.S2 xhe average mortality throughout the whole of England and Wales has been, of late years, about 1 in 60; but in 1810, it was 1 in 50; in 1800, it was 1 in 47; and in 1780, the ratio of death was lin 40.®3 In London, the annual mortality in the middle [81 This seems to be a mistake. Mr. Finlaison, in his evidence lately given before a select committee of the House of Commons, states, that no inference whatever c.an be drawn from the registers of deaths throughout England, so very imperfectly are they kept; and it is evident, from what he mentions, that the rate of mortality is by no means so low as is generally imagined. He is inclined to estimate the mortality in England as 1 in 3Ci, being the same as that in the town of Ostend, whose salubrity he considers equal to that of England, on the average.—R. M.3 82 This is not correct. There is good reason to believe, that in Scotland the chance of long life is greater. According to an emin- ent French statist, the number of deaths, per cent, is less in Scot- land and Iceland, than in any other European country R. M.] 83 Pembrokeshire and Anglesey have one death yearly in 83 indi- viduals—the lowest rate of mortality that has been known in Europe. There is perhaps no section of the United States where the annual mortality is less than this. In several towns on Connec_ ticut River, in the State of Massachusetts, the average annual mor- tality for the last fifteen years, is I in 81. Our large cities are not more healthy than many of the largest in England. The average number of deaths in Philadelphia for the last ten years, is 1 in 38.85, annually; hut for the fourteen years previous, the mortality was as low as 1 in 47.8(1 of the population.—See Emerson’s Medical Statis- tics, American Jour7ial of the Medical Sciences. 183! [No reliance can be placed on the report of such prodigious salubrity as is im. K -2