A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864.

  • Trench, William Stewart, 1809-1877.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    science is einpliatically a public one, we must raise no impediment to the force or efficiency of our armoury, but carry on, if need be, , the battle at the public cost. Hooping cough which, next to diarrhoea, caused more deaths among children than any other single zymotic, was less affected by variations of season and of age ; but, as in its prominent symptoms it resembles bronchitic affections, like them it was most fatal in the first and fourth quarters of the year, when the temperature is lowest. Diarrhoea caused 6,653 deaths, of which 5,737 were of children below five years of age. Indeed, so peculiarly is it the scourge of earliest infancy that 3,565, equal to fifty-three per cent, of its vic- tims at all ages, occurred among infants below one year of age ; and of the remaining number, 1,633, or more than half among those who were between their first and second year. It is the most fatal of all our zy mo tics ; nor during the short period over which its dread reign extends, is it second to the Asiatic cholera, even when that awful visitant sweeps as a destroying pestilence over the land. But diarrhoea is perennial; it comes as an epidemic with a punc- tual constancy, year after year, and marks the months of August and September as unerringly as do the notes of the cuckoo the approach of spring. The average number of deaths in Liverpool from this disease during the March and June quarters of the year is four or five weekly ; but during the month of August it rises to 50, 60, or 70 in the same period. The cause of this vast and sud- den increase of deaths of children in those sunny months of summer when nature intended the young to be joyous, healthy, and happy, is a question worthy of our most serious consideration. That atmospheric heat is a concomitant of its increased death-rate is certain ; that the two are relatively proportionate is very probable ; and that the year 1857, the year of greatest mortality from diar- rhoea, was also the period when the range of the thermometer was highest, is, though a single fact, more than an accidental coinci- dence. I have stated that 1857 was the highest; for we must omit from our calculation the year 1854 when cholera was epidemic, as there then prevailed an exceptional predisposition to bowel complaints. But to assert that the summer temperature of our , English climate is per se the cause of infant mortality is to assume i