Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Premature death : its promotion or prevention. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
54/104 (page 48)
![prevalence of infantile fever, but it is both necessary and interesting to trace its relation to the enormous quantity of fatal convulsive disease that occurs here during the first days of life; for not only is there a total of 4908 cases recorded under the two heads [convulsions and tetanus], but I find that no less than one-half of the entire number of deaths, viz. 8,005, to°k place within a fortnight If this be true in substantial native houses, nothing more need be said of the huts which the masses of the population inhabit, unless it be that the poorest people use cow-dung for fuel, while they have not, as the others have, the little ventilation which a cold outer air will enforce in spite of all endeavours to prevent it. General diseases, so called, other than the infectious as commonly known, have the fourth place in order of pre- dominance among the causes of premature death, and among these diseases the foremost position is held by cancer, the wasting of infa?its (mesenteric wasting), croup, scrofula, and rheumatism. Cancer caused 82,820 deaths during the ten years 1861- 70. This formidable malady is of the rarest until after the twenty-fifth year of age. Between the twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth year of age the mortality from it begins to increase; after the thirty-fifth year the augmentation](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21072991_0054.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
