Medical diseases of infancy and childhood.

  • Williams, Dawson, 1854-1928.
Date:
[1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical diseases of infancy and childhood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    of, and to hear the therapeutics of the nursery spoken of with a certain scorn. The inhabitants of the nursery, however, are numerous. About one- third of the population is under fifteen years of age ; a quarter under ten, and these numerous inhabitants of the nursery are the hope of the future. The mortality among infants and children is enor- mous. More than two-fifths of the deaths in England and Wales during the ten years 1881-1890, occurred among children under the age of ten years. The greater part of this huge mortality took place under five years of age. With a mean population under five years of three and a half millions, in round numbers, the deaths numbered two millions. In the same decennium there were nearly nine million births, and over two million deaths. The annual death-rate per 1,000 at all ages was 1908 ; under five years it was 56-82. We must pass to the age period sixty- five to seventy-five—the Psalmist's span of life — before we again find the death-rate rising to so high a level. As the number of deaths in the first five years of life is greater than at any other period of life of the same duration, so the number of deaths in the first year of life is greater than in any of the subsequent years. Nearly a fourth of all the deaths registered in the decennium were those of infants under one year—a million and a quarter out of a total of five millions and a quarter. In the German Empire in the two years 1892-93 the deaths in infants one year old and under exceeded a third of the total number of deaths. It will be instructive to indicate briefly the main causes to which this excessive mortality in infants and children was attributed. If the annual mortality per 1,000,000 living at all ages and at childish ages in England and Wales be compared, it is seen that the rate in childhood in the decennium 1881-90 was in excess in the follow- ing classes of causes :—