On the mortality of childbed and maternity hospitals / by J. Matthews Duncan.

Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the mortality of childbed and maternity hospitals / by J. Matthews Duncan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    own reputation's sake, as well with the charitable motive of not alarming all the pregnant women in the community, the death is imputed to any other possible cause rather than to the dreaded puerperal. It is not necessary, however, that any motive be assigned for this. The defect lies in our system of re- gistration—not in those who supply the returns. Practitioners make a very proper distinction between dying in childbirth, and dying of childbirth. When a woman happens to die in childbed of some intercurrent disease—as phthisis, pneumonia, dysentery, apoplexy, albuminuria, bronchitis, morbus cordis, etc.—this alone is returned, and rightly so, to the registrar as the cause of death. Consequently all these deaths have no place in the registration reports of deaths in childbed. But a lying-in hospital is debited with every death oc- curring among its p)atients—whether the death arise directly from parturition, from puerperal disease, or from any accidental intercurrent disease. In this way, I think, we can account for much of the discrepancy between the death-rate of lying-in hospitals, and that deduced from the returns of the Ee- gistrar-General. To illustrate my meaning, and to show how statistics must be influenced by this source of inaccuracy, I have compiled the following Table :—