Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/295

Rh although it still remained two or three times greater than among the people at large. During a period of eleven years (1869–79) the mortality in the prisons of Prussia was 42·87 per cent, of the deaths from all causes, and 12·32 per 1000 prisoners.

"For England we have Baly's report on the prevalence of phthisis from 1825 to 1842 among the convicts at Millbank Penitentiary, where 31 out of 205 deaths were due to cholera, and 75 of the remaining 174, or 43 per cent., were due to phthisis; while of 355 prisoners discharged during the same period on account of ill-health, 90 were phthisical, and of these quite threefifths, according to precedent, would have died of that disease if they had been left to complete their term. In that way we bring the annual mortality from phthisis at Millbank up to 13 per 1000, or more than three times that of the London population at large. Pietra Santa gives the following facts for the prisons of Algiers:—Of 23 natives who died in the public prison of Alger, 17 succumbed to phthisis; in the central prison of l'Harrach there were 57 deaths from phthisis in a total of 153, or 37·2 per cent. The important influence of imprisonment on the occurrence of this disease is very clearly brought out by its prevalence in those regions where phthisis is in general a rare thing, as, for example, in Lower Bengal. Webb quotes the following remarks by Green with reference to the commonness of the disease among the natives in the prison of Midnapore: 'After a careful examination into the early history and origin of the cases of this disease as they have occurred, I have been led to the conclusion that many of the men thus affected were previously hale, and capable of earning their livelihood, and were not subject to cough before imprisonment. I find that after they have been working a few weeks or months on the roads here, and inhabiting the jail, they have become the subjects of attacks of inflammation of the lungs, and from time to time of frequent repetition of these attacks, which have ended in some cases.... in death in the acute stage, in others in a prostrate sinking state with a gradual wasting away of the body,