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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    and habitation are greatly improved, their closeness of aggregation in towns and their overcrowding in houses diminished, and out-door employment more generally pro- vided ; again, unless women are withdrawn from the labour market, and encouraged to obey their maternal instincts in the better care and nurture of their offspring ;—the specious bubble will burst sooner or later, and the real effects of such social calamities will surely be revealed in time by some startling, though perhaps not sudden, increase of the death- roll, from an enfeebled and degenerate population. [1875.—It must be recollected that my original remarks, here and elsewhere in this Essay, were published ten years ago, and that in the interval important improvements have been effected, especially by the Registration Act of 1874, and its administration. The remarks in the next section are, however, retained, partly to show how much has been effected by the new Act. But the improvements themselves relate wholly to Births and Deaths, and will be noticed hereafter. | § VI.—How the Causes of Death are Registered. (1.) In the absence of a public registration of disease, we may be told that, at all events, the more serious sickness which ends in death is recorded in the certificate of the cause of death, which every medical practitioner in England is expected [1865], in Ireland is required by law, and in Scot- land is forced under penalty, to supply gratuitously for the public good in every fatal case attended by him. Of this authorized certification enough has been said by many competent observers to show that its real value has been greatly overrated, and that its results have not fulfilled the sanguine expectations of its early advocates. ' The reader is referred especially to a Paper of mine in 1872, reprinted at the end of ‘ Fallacies of Vital and Sanitary Statistics, in this volume.
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