POVERTY AND DEATH.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 100, 28 April 1888, Page 3 (Supplement)

POVERTY AND DEATH.

The Influence of Easy Circumstances lv

P^olongiag Life.

The author said that Villerme of Paris was one of the first to show that comfort prolonged life greatly, by showing that beWeen the age of forty and fifty years persons in good circumstances in Paris had a death rate of 3*3 per I,OCO, against one of 187 per 1,000 of persons pi 'similar ages among the poor ; and ho also found that in Paris, between 1817 and 1836, one in fifteen of the population of the poorarrondissement died annually, against one in 65 in the second, or rich quarter. Mr Chad wick had shown that in London there were some subdistricts of the wealthy classes where the death rate did nob exceed 11 *3 per 1,000 annually, while there were localities (slums) where ib rose to 38 per 1,000. In 1844, when the general London death rate was 24 per 1,000, that gentleman found, in Bethnal Green, that the moa.n age at death of the gentry and professionals was fo-ty-four years, against twenty-two years among the artisan class ; and recently, when the death rate among the gentry was about 55 in England and Walts, that of the artisan class in Lambeth was 20*5. In 1874 Mr C. Ansoll, of the National Insurance Company, found that only 8 per cent, of the children of the upper classes died in thoir first year, against 19 per cent, in the general population of Liverpool, and 53 per cont. in the slums of that and other largo cities. Ansell had concluded that whereas then: died in England and Wales, in 1874, 368,179 person's under the age of 60 years, if the mortality had been equal to that of the rich, only 226,040 would have died, so that poverty in one year had killed 142,139 persons. I)c Thouvenin had truly remarked that, with the exception of cotton-beating, dividing and carding silk cocoons, whitelead, and grinding, there are scarcely any trades necessarily dangerous to life ; but ho found that tho deaths from consumption were nearly one-fourth of all deaths among the pooi-, and only or about; one eighteenth of the deaths among the rich. Edward Smith's statistics at the Brompbon Consumption Hospital of London, which he had verified at the North London Consumption Hospital, showed that his patients hncl been the offspring of parents who, on an average, had produced seven children each, and, as such children had been ill-fed, they succumbed more easily to that disease.—Dr. Dryedale in " Medical Record."