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
Catalogue details

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.

    22/348 page 2
    expected from me if I attempt to show the utter inadequacy of existing means to the requirements of an advancing science, and to the due application of its benefits to the people. The more important defects of our registration system may be thus briefly described :— 1. The imperfect and often erroneous certification of the causes of death, especially in crowded districts,! and the absence of any sufficient provision for verifying and correcting reported facts, so that conclusions founded on these returns are often worse than useless. 2. The frequent omission to register births, ‘ owing to a defect in the Registration Act,’? and the non-registration of still-births, so that it is impossible either to calculate.correctly the natural increase of population, or to ascertain the number and the causes of the deaths of new-born infants. 3. The want of correct and accessible information re- specting the diseases recorded by the medical officers of unions and other public institutions, with especial reference to their causes, consequences, and periodical prevalence. 4. The want of an organized system for the compilation and publication of such facts in every district. 5. The want of correspondence between the boundaries of Registration districts or sub-districts, and the boundaries of districts constituted for municipal government or sanitary management, so that local investigators are generally com- pelled to set aside the Registrar-General’s returns, and to collect and re-arrange the materials, at a vast expenditure of time and labour, for the purposes of sanitary inquiry.’ ' See information supplied by provincial officers of health. (Essays on State Medicine, pp. 102-3-4, 350.) See also Mr. Alfred Aspland’s paper ‘On Certain Fallacies in our National Mortuary Returns,’ (Trans- actions of Manchester Statistical Society.) ? See 20th Annual Report of Registrar-General, p. 1. 3 Some instances of conflicting boundaries will be described in subse- quent essays, papers, and evidence.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3