Sanitary state of Cape Town / by W.T. Black.

  • Black, William Thomas, 1824-1909.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary state of Cape Town / by W.T. Black. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ON THE SANITARY STATE OF CAPE TOWN. BY W. J. BLACK, F.R.C.S.E., S.M. From “ Sanitary Record,” August 17, 1877. The forthcoming International Exhibition of South Africa will .soon be drawing the attention of correspondents and news-readers to the capital city of the British colony, Cape Town. It is to be hoped, likewise, that the attention of some travelling sanitarians and hygeists will be attracted to the city at the same time, but for a different purpose. Late reports in the Times' correspondence state that the statistics of mortality have now attained the exceeding high figure of 68 per 1000 per annum for March 1877—quite as bad as the ancient mortality of the British army in Bengal, of 69 per 1000 per annum, previous to the introduction of modern sani- tary improvements by the medical department after the mutiny of 1857-58. Cape Town has become in the last ten years much isolated from the general progress of the civilised world, since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1867, and so has become withdrawn from the influ- ences of cosmopolitan inspection and criticism by travellers, tourists, and correspondents. This defect has not even yet been attempted to be rectified by the laying of telegraphic connection with con- tiguous countries east and west. It is only a few years (1867-68) since, that a serious endemic of typhoid fever raged in Cape Town, and slew a large number of its inhabitants—from 1000 to 1100, in addition to the ordinary mortality of about 800 per annum—during its prevalence of seven months, July 1867 to January 1868 ; thus raising the ordinary rate of 27 deaths per 1000 per annum to an amount varying from 60 to 63 per 1000 per annum. The causes of this unexceptional mortality have never been difficult to discover, and have been reported on year after year by the medica1 officers