General Report on the Sanitary Condition of the town of Kelso : drawn up at the request of the Board of Governers of Police / by Charles Wilson.

Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General Report on the Sanitary Condition of the town of Kelso : drawn up at the request of the Board of Governers of Police / by Charles Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    18/28 page 18
    Avorafro duration ofli in (lificrent ciauscs. origin TTOukl, at least in as far as Kelso was concerned, be very seriously impugned. But we learn, that fevers constituted then, at an average, 20.76 percent., or more than a fourth, of all diseases coming under treatment; while in some of the years the proportion 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 decennium, from 1829 to 1839, when public cleanliness was more respected, and the marshes, though still exceptionable, had been extensively drained ; and we find ague all but annihilated, and the amount of continued fever reduced to 7.36 per cent., or less than a thirteenth of the general amount of sickness. Nor is our gain in the later decennium limited to this immense reduction. The viru- lence of every form of disease appears to have received a corres- ])onding mitigation; and the mortality, which, in the first decennium, amounted to 4.6 per cent, of every description of sickness, fell to somewhat under 2.6 per cent, in the second. Scrofulous disoi’dcrs, 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 . supplied by the general record of the Kelso Dispensary, and which, of course, relate to the 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 circum- stances of unequal advantage with respect to hygienic conditions. The interval selected is again one of ten years, terminating with .Tune, 1847 ; 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 whose 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 position, with respect to nearly all those conditions of health usually h.eld to constitute the ground of sanitary enquiry. In the first of those classes, then, I find that the average duration of life was 34 years : in the second, it was 44 years and 13 Aveeks. 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. Tims, Avhile one hundred of the class possessing the minor advantages lived only an aggregate of 3400 years, the same number of (liat which was more favourably situated as to sanitary conditions
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3