The practical result of this system of management has been, as we have seen, that the lying-in division of this workhouse, although working under many singular disadvantages, has escaped the usual fatality of special lying-in hospitals.
During the thirteen years included in the tables there has been no epidemic, and the deaths have almost always been single and disconnected.
The experience of lying-in wards in London workhouses somewhat resembles the experience of Liverpool workhouse.
In the report of the committee appointed to consider the cubic space of metropolitan workhouses, 1867, is given a table, No. 11, shewing the number of deliveries and deaths after delivery during five years in forty metropolitan workhouses.
The leading facts are abstracted in Table VI. Workhouses in which deaths after delivery took place, during the five years, are separated in the abstract from workhouses in which no deaths took place.
There were during these five years in all the workhouses 11,870 deliveries and 93 deaths, giving a death-rate of 7·8 per 1,000. The deaths from puerperal diseases amounted to 39, giving a death-rate of 3·3 per 1,000. There were 20 deaths from accidents of childbirth; being a death-rate of 1·7 per 1,000. The total death-rate due to both classes was 5 per 1,000.
The largest number of deliveries took place in Marylebone and in St. Pancras. In the former, on an average of 243 deliveries per annum, the death-rate was 8·2 per 1,000. One half of this, however, was due to consumption. Of the remaining deaths 3 were due to puerperal diseases (2·4 per 1,000) and 2 to accidents. The death-rate due to puerperal diseases and accidents of childbirth was thus 4·1 per 1,000.
In St. Pancras workhouse, on an average of 200 deliveries per annum, the death-rate was 11 per 1,000, of which 9 per 1,000 were due to puerperal diseases. Recent disclosures with regard to St. Pancras workhouse may to some extent account for this high death-rate. The number of deliveries in these two workhouses bring them almost within the category of lying-in hospitals.
There are four other workhouses in which the annual deliveries are respectively 171, 120, and two of them 111, while in all the others the numbers fall much below 100.
In one such instance (Holborn), where the deliveries have averaged fifty a year, the death-rate was exceptionally high, 24 per 1,000, one half of which was due to puerperal disease. In another instance, St. Mary’s, Islington, with seventy-five deliveries per annum, the death-rate averaged 29 per 1,000. But the causes are not stated, and cannot now be ascertained. In Whitechapel, where there were 111 deliveries per annum, the death-rate was 10·8 per 1,000, one half being due to puerperal diseases.