Essays and papers on some fallacies of statistics concerning life and death, health and disease : with suggestions towards an improved system of registration / by Henry W. Rumsey.

  • Henry Wyldbore Rumsey
Date:
1875
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays and papers on some fallacies of statistics concerning life and death, health and disease : with suggestions towards an improved system of registration / by Henry W. Rumsey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    disorders, made in the first instance by the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, and since approved by the Joint Committee of this and the Social Science Associations on State Medicine. With regard to the difficult subject of the remuneration of contributors of returns of disease, your Committee would suggest that public medical officers, whether belonging to the Poor Law Medical Service, or attached to gaols, hospitals, dispensaries, or provident clubs, should either be paid at the rate of twopence or threepence for each case recorded by them, or should receive, as some slight acknowledgment of their services, a sum varying from two to four guineas per annum for such satisfactory weekly returns of all new cases of disease as might be deemed needful by the Local Government Board. ] (4.) To revert briefly to some of the grounds for this pro- ject. Considering the ignorance and misapprehension which so commonly prevail on this subject, it cannot be too often impressed on the public mind that ‘a mere mortality return is no index to the health of a district,’! and that conversely, the prevalence of an epidemic by no means implies an increase of the death-rate. ‘ There are seasons in which, even though sickness proves very general, the mortality is not excessive.’ ? A comparatively mild epidemic, with its more numerous survivors, may entaila larger and heavier burden of unhealthi- ness upon a community than a most deadly pestilence with its fewer survivors.’ Seasons of drought, of famine, or of flood may display at the time but very short death-rolls.4 Shallow reasoners upon such events may infer that the public health has not suffered. They may even assume that some ephemeral change of circumstances or of social habits, under the disaster, has actually lengthened the lives of the sufferers ; but unless the people are really made more hardy and vigorous by their misfortunes, wiser in food and drink, and more frugal in their manner of life; unless, also, their conditions of labour 1 See an able document on Registration by the Irish College of Phy- sicians. 1863. 2 Manchester San. Assoc. Rep. 1865. p. 7. 3 See III. ‘A Defence,’ &c., p. 12, loc. cit. 4 Observe the diminution of mortality during the Lancashire famine in the American ciyil war.
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