NOTE TO TABLE No. II.
In calculating the Death-Rates given in the last lines of this Table, I have proceeded as follows:—
First, I have counted all Workhouse-Population and Workhouse-Deaths as forming part of the aggregate population and aggregate mortality of that Union to which the particular workhouse legally belongs.
Next, I have distributed among the several sub-districts the population and the mortality of their Union Workhouses, in the ratio of the general sub-district population; so as to prevent the high Workhouse-Mortality from telling unjustly against that sub-district in which the Workhouse happens to have been erected.
Thus, for instance, the East London Union has its male Workhouse placed in the territory of the West London Union; but I have reckoned it as belonging to the East London Union, in respect both of its population and its deaths. Similarly, the City of London Union has its Workhouse situate at Bow; but, not the less, I have considered its 794 inmates and 526 deaths as belonging to the population and the mortality of our central Union.
Thus again for the sub-district death-rates—for instance, in the two sub-districts of the East London Union: reckoning the Workhouse-Population not as exclusively due either to Cripplegate or to St. Botolph, but as furnished by these sub-districts jointly, in the ratio of their populations, I have distributed 576 between them in the proportion, 23,435 : 20,582. The Workhouse-Deaths of the period (802) have been similarly distributed; and the rates, given in the last line of the table, are finally deduced from a comparison of these sums, viz:—
23,435 + 306.66 : 2458 + 426.991 :: 1000 : 121.515, which divided by 5 (to show an annual, instead of a quinquennial, result) gives 24.30 as the annual death-rate for St. Botolph; and, in like manner, 20,582 + 269.33 : 2483 + 375.008 gives 137.065 as the quinquennial, and 27.41 as the annual death-rate per thousand for the sub-district of Cripplegate.
Hospital Deaths have been distributed, as far as possible, according to the previous residence of the patients. Thus the north sub-district of the West London Union, in which St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is situated, is made to retain only its just proportion of deaths. On the same principle I have reckoned to the death-lists of other sub-districts those cases in which I could ascertain that the residents of such sub-districts had gone to die either in St. Bartholomew’s, or in other Metropolitan Hospitals.