The deaths from cholera in England in 1849 were 53,293; of those,
14,718, or 27 per cent. of the whole, occurred in children under 15
years of age. Of the 334 deaths which are recorded in the Appendix to
this work, 127, or 38 per cent., are those of children under 15, whilst
of the remaining 229 which occurred in the rest of London during the
first four weeks of the epidemic, only 61, or 26 per cent., took place
before the age of 15,—a proportion nearly the same as in the whole of
England in 1849. The higher proportion of deaths amongst children in the
houses supplied with the impure water from the Thames at Battersea
Fields, probably arose from the circumstance that children are very fond
of drinking water in warm weather. I often heard such remarks as the
following, in making my inquiries in the south districts of London:—“My
children like water better than tea or anything else, I cannot keep them
away from the water-butt;” or, “the child that is dead used to drink a
great deal of that water, she was big enough to reach to the butt
herself.”
Dr. Guy, physician to King’s College Hospital, made a table showing the
occupations of 4,312 males, of fifteen years of age and upwards, who
died of cholera in London in the epidemic of 1848–49; together with the
ratio which the deaths bear to the living, as well as it could be
ascertained from the census of 1841. I have not room for the whole
table, but have selected the occupations which suffered most, and those
which suffered least. The following abstract of Dr. Guy’s table contains
all the occupations where the deaths from cholera equalled one-fiftieth
of the number living, and all those in which the deaths did not exceed
one in two hundred and fifty living.
[Sidenote: PROPORTION OF DEATHS IN DIFFERENT OCCUPATIONS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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