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To-day no disease, except possibly tuberculosis, is a greater
agency in augmenting the general mortality and furthering
sickness than syphilis. Its hereditary features, the numerous
ways in which it may be communicated outside of the performance
of the sexual act, and the careful way in which it is kept from
the sanitary authorities render it a scourge which, at the
present day, we seem to have no method of successfully
repressing.
Modern Mortality from Infectious Diseases.--As to the direct
influence on the mortality of the most common infectious diseases
of the present day, tuberculosis, universally prevalent, is
invariably in the lead. No race or geographic situation is exempt
from it. Osler mentions that in the Blood Indian Reserve of the
Canadian Northwest Territories, during six years, among a
population of about 2000 there were 127 deaths from pulmonary
consumption. This enormous death-rate, it is to be remembered,
occurred in a tribe occupying one of the finest climates of the
world, among the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a region in
which consumption is extremely rare among the white population,
and in which cases of tuberculosis from the Eastern provinces do
remarkably well. Mayo-Smith quotes a table illustrating the
annual deaths (based on the returns from 1887 to 1891) from
certain infectious diseases per 10,000 European inhabitants. The
figures for each disease give a rough measure of its prevalence
in different countries. The large figures as to small-pox show
the absence in Italy and "Hieronymi Fracastorii," Veronae, 1530.
Statistics and Sociology, New York, 1885.
Austria of vaccination; diphtheria seems to be very fatal in
Germany and Austria; Italy has a large rate for typhoid fever,
and the same is true of the other fevers; France, Germany, and
Austria show a very large rate for tuberculosis, while Italy has
a small rate.
DEATHS FROM CERTAIN DISEASES PER 10,000 INHABITANTS.
Small- Scarlet Diphtheria Typhoid Tuber-
COUNTRY. pox. Measles. fever fever. culosis
Italy, . . . . . 3.86 6.17 2.99 6.08 7.49 13.61
France (cities). 2.3 5.18 3.1 6.66 5.32 33.
England, . . . . 0.11 4.68 2.31 1.74 1.9 16.09
Ireland, . . . . 0.01 2.01 1.22 0.76 2.33 21.15
Germany (cities). 0.04 2.8 2.15 10.21 2.11 31.29
Prussia, . . . . 0.03 3.2 2.46 14.17 2.26 28.06
Austria, . . . . 4.43 5.36 5.57 13.2 5.42 37.2
Switzerland, . . 0.06 1.53 1.22 3.53 1.47 21.07
Belgium, . . . . 1.52 6.2 1.62 5.77 3.83 19.87
Holland, . . . . 0.02 3.93 0.38 1.45 2.5 19.21
Sweden, . . . . . 0.01 2.3 3.69 3.89 2.22 0.
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