Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 78-79. (Budapest, 1976)

TANULMÁNYOK - Mádai Lajos: Településhigiénés és demográfiai viszonyok a fővárosban az 1870-es években (angol nyelven)

In the second place we can find the inflammation of lungs, plcuritis, and bronchitis with 30.4% among babies and 27.6% with children between one and four years. Catarrh of the bowels caused the death of babies in 63.4% and that of small children from 1 to 4 in 20.9%. Two thirds of the leading causes of death afflicted the children up to four, and the rate of the diseases suffered by the older generations was significantly smaller (here I mean organic heart disease, dessication in old age, cerebral heamorrhage, stroke, etc.), as only few people lived to meet such diseases. Tuberculosis caused the death of forty times as many people in every ten thousand in 1874—75 than in 1969—70. On the other infectious diseases epidemic cholera, smallpox, enteric fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever and measles also caused severe losses to the population. In the years after the unification of the capital smallpox was very dangerous. In 1874 945 people died of smallpox, and in 1875 426. The next outbreak of the epidemic was in 1879 and lasted for four years resulting 1578 deaths. The majority of the population did not much care of the possibility of vaccination, and only 23 — 25% of the one-year-old children got immunization. In the next great epidemic of smallpox (1885—1887) 2,000 out of the 5.916 ill persons died. It was in the wake of this tragic event that the national assembly framed Law no. 22 of 1887 making vaccination and revaccination against smallpox compulsory. From that time on smallpox appeared only sporadically, and is now effectively missing from the epidemic map of this country. The epidemics of cholera appeared less often, but were much more serious than those of smallpox. After the epidemics of 1831, 1854 and 1856, 2,558 people died of cholera in 1872/73 out of the 5,284 ill persons, which meant 111 deaths in 10,000, i.e. 48.4%. In the course of the epidemics of 1886, 1892, and 1893 fewer people got ill and died. In the 1870's and 1880's typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria and measles were very frequent. Dysentery seems to have been not at all frequent, but this may be due to the fact that this type of illness could not be diagnosed well in those days, its origins were not known and the deaths might have been attributed to inflammation of the bowels. The „illness of the lechers" or syphilis was liable only for 0.3% of all deaths, similarly to dysentery. But the frequency of venereal diseases was much higher than the mortality owing to them. This was the other great popular disease beside tuberculosis in those days. In the Rókus Hospital 2,551 out of the 14,690 patients suffered from syphilis, 924 male and 1,627 female. Apart from typhus and syphilis, the other virulent diseases afflicted mainly the children up to four, this being one of the causes of the high mortality among children. 66.3% of those dying of smallpox, 77.2% of dyphtheria, 68.7% of scarlet fever, and 93.2% of measles were babies and children up to four. The unfavourable conditions of Budapest in this respect can best be understood if we compare mortality here with that in other European cities. The comparison of the data from 1881 shows that Budapest was among the first as far as mortality owing to tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever and dyphtheria. The ratio of tuberculosis, typhus and dyphtheria was more than three times as high as that of London at the end of the list with its lowest mortality, and the ratio of smallpox was also twice as high.