Читать книгу Rural Hygiene - Henry N. Ogden - Страница 10

	New York	Outside	Difference
1898	20.4	14.5	5.9
1899	19.6	14.9	4.7
1900	20.6	15.0	5.6
1901	19.9	15.1	4.8
1902	18.6	14.1	4.5
1903	17.9	15.2	2.7
1904	18.5	17.3	1.2
1905	18.3	15.8	2.5
1906	18.4	15.7	2.7
1907	18.5	16.4	2.1
1908	16.8	15.5	1.3

The decrease in the city rate is to be expected, since with greater knowledge of sanitary matters, more precautions against disease would naturally be taken. But it is not likely that the country is becoming more careless, although the tendency to concentrate population even in rural hamlets may have an effect. It is rather more likely that the reports are made more carefully and that the records are more complete now than formerly. The apparent increase in the number of deaths in rural communities is, therefore, due to greater attention in reporting deaths rather than to any real increase in the number.

If the difference between the rural community death-rate and the rate in all the cities of more than 8000 population in New York State be shown, the difference between the city rate and the country rate is even less than that shown in the table, being only 0.7 deaths in 1000 for 1908. This shows that the boasted superiority of the country over cities is not very great; that it is marked only in the case of a very large city like New York; that, as the size of the city decreases, the difference disappears, and that the country rate in the United States is high when compared with the general rate of other countries like Denmark or even England, where the general rate includes the large cities.

Effect of children on death-rate.

An interesting sidelight on the apparent tendency of the country to have an increasing death-rate, year by year, is shown by the meager figures which are available on the subject of the number of small children in the different towns. The Chief Clerk in the Census Office, Mr. William S. Rossiter, has investigated the proportion of children in two rural counties of New York State, Otsego and Putnam, and has discovered the startling fact that while the population in those counties has hardly changed since 1860, the proportion of young children has decreased almost one third in the forty years ending with 1900, as shown by the following table:—