“LIFE CAPITAL”

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4330, 13 April 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

“LIFE CAPITAL”

To those who areefond of figures and of the often puzzling problems which are presented by. statistics there is much that is of interest ' in the tables given by Mr Shirley Murphy, Medical Officer of Health to the County of London, in the annual report which he ;haa jusl'issned; Many interesting speculations, foy example; might be founded on the facts he gives regarding the curious variations of the marriage rate from year to year, while the gloomiest prognostications might be drawn, by those who incline to pessimism, from the steady and almost unbroken* diminution of the birth rate during the past quarter of a century. Let us, however, concentrate our attention upon the, death rate. ..If other things were to remain the same, it is obvious that the ratio of the deaths to the population in any community ought to give a fair basis on which to judge of its healthineas and to estimate the •AVERAGE PROSPECTS’OF LIFE offered to every' infant bom to it. No sooner, however, do we penetrate below the mere surface of things than we find that a multitude of circumstances besides mere healthiness influence the mortality in a district, and that the most erroneous conclusions may be arrived at by a casual comparison of crude death rates. The point to which we would just now specially direct attention is one -which is insisted on by Mr Shirley Murphy iu regard to what he speaks of as “life capital."' namely, that death rates tell us little unless wo know the sort of people who die. and that in estimating the influence of any variation of its death rate upon a community we must not merely count the number of the dead, but must. carefully -consider what prospects of life they would have had if disease or accident had not carried them off, so that we may estimate the'loss of “life capital” to the community involved by their decease. Putting the matter iu

that ■ ■■ PECULIARLY IMPERSONAL 'MANNER ■which statisticians love, it is clear, that a very considerable increase in the, number of deaths among those whose life’s work is doner-say, those between seventy and eigbty years of age—might not only be no loss, but might even, be an actual gain to a community by relieving it of the burden of supporting so many non-producers. The death of. a child, however—a child which has within it a potentiality of many years of active,productive life— is quite.dnother affair; while the death of a young person who has weathered all the accidents of childhood, and is just beginning to repay the trouble spent in rearing and education is a dead loss from an, economic point of view. If; then, we are in. any way to understand the bearing of, any variation in the death rate upon the* prosperity of a community we must express our losses, not in numbers of .deaths, but in quantity of “life, capital” destroyed. . . . Now the increased loss, of life from r ,: ~htheria fell upon the young; there is no difference at all among those above 25. With diarrhoea, again, not onlydbqa all. the increase fall upon the young, but more, for among those above 25 years of age there is an actual improvement, all of which is neutralised by the increased mortality from this disease among the young. Thus we have IN DIPHTHERIA AND DIARRHOEA, two diseases against which we must place a very heavy loss of ’‘life capital,' for they kill those who have their whole working life before them. In regard to cancer, the boot is on the other leg. Both in old and young cancer has increased; Dut the increase is 25 times as great in the older group as it is in the younger, so that the drain of this disease, great as it is upon - "livesi” is not so great upon ‘‘life capital." ■ ' ■ <■ Statistics arC not generally veiy interesting things, and the errors- to which they are open are very great; nevertheless, if figures are to he,of any use in municipal life, and.if we are to obtain from them any safe guidance, they must, be, worked out like these, carefully'and laboriously, and we may fairly point out that the annual report of’the medical officer of the county of London is a document which, froth a stalls tical point of view, does the-highest credit to Mr Shirley Murphy, and to the stall by whom he has been assisted.—" The Hospital,”.