The Report of the Irish Registrar-General on cancer in Ireland
is melancholy reading. It shows that deaths from this terrible cause are increasing very fast, the rate rising from 2-7 per 10,000 of the living in 1864 to 31 in 1881, 4.6 in 1891, and 6.5 in 1901. In England and Wales in the same period the rate rose from 3.9 to 8-3, and in Scotland from 4.3 to 8. After making all fair allowances for more accurate diagnosis, and for a decrease in the reluctance of doctors to place a stigma on their patients' families, that is a terrible record, not diminished in its menace by the fact that the rate is highest among those who live what we are accustomed to think the healthy outdoor life of farmers and labourers. No cause can be suggested for the increase, though it is clear, unless the figures be false, that we are either transgressing some law of health in a new way, or that the hereditary tendency, which is admitted to exist, spreads over a wider area of relationship. That is, the descendants who are not poisoned are fewer. The female deaths are to the male as 55 to 45, which is the more
notable because clay pipes are one of the few traceable causes either of the disease or of its localisation.
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