OBJECTIVE.
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desire to fix the observation of all as a prime factor in determining the decline and mortality of young female life, and the multiplied loss consequent thereon. Says Mr. Simon,* medical officer of the Privy Council of Great Britain, —
“The death-rates of the young are, in my opinion, among the most important studies in sanitary science. In the first place, their tender young lives, as compared with the more hardened and acclimatized lives of the adult population, furnish a very sensitive test of sanitary circumstances ; . . . and, secondly,
those places where they are most apt to die are, necessarily, the places where survivors are most sickly, and where, if they struggle through a scrofulous childhood to realize an abortive puberty, they beget a sicklier brood than themselves, even less capable of labor , and even less susceptible of education. It cannot be too distinctly recognized, that a high local mortality of youth must almost necessarily denote a high local prevalence of those causes which determine a degeneration of race. ’ ’
An inquiry undertaken some two years since f left little room for doubt as to the
* Introduction to Greenhow’s Report to General Board of Health, 1858.
t Sanitary Condition Working Classes : Report Mass. Bureau Lahor Statistics, 1874.