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City That Was (The History of medicine series)
City That Was - The History of medicine series Author:Stephen Smith, John Duffy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: r phoid fevers, which resistlessly swept through the tenement houses, decimating the poverty- stricken tenants. At intervals, the great oriental plague, Asiat... more »ic cholera, swooped down upon the city with fatal energy and gathered its enormous harvest of dead. Even "Yellow Fever," the great pestilence of the tropics, made occasional incursions and found a most congenial field for its operations. CAILURE to improve the unhealthy condi- tions of the city, and the tendency to aggravate them by a large increase of the tenement-house population, offensive trades, accumulations of domestic waste, and the filth of streets, stables, and privy Enormous Sacrifice pits, then universal, caused of Life an enormous sacrifice ot life, especially among children. This fact is strikingly illustrated by the following comparison of figures taken from the official records. The standard ratio of deaths to the total living in a community, where the death-rate is normal under proper sanitary conditions, has been fixed by competent authority at about 15 in 1,000 of population. The death-rate in New York, in the five years preceding 1866, averaged 38 in 1,000 population, which is 23 in excess of the normal standard of 15 in the 1,000. In a city with a population of 1,000,000, the estimatedpopulation of New York in 1865, a death-rate of 38 in the 1,000 means 23,000 deaths annually from preventable diseases. Mortality statistics computed on a scale of forty years, the period during which New York has been under an intelligent sanitary government, still more impressively show the former waste of life through municipal neglect of the elementary principles of public hygiene. The lesson which these figures teach should be engraven on the memory of every man, woman, and child. Our authority ...« less