Infant mortality / Edward Bunnell Phelps.

  • Phelps, Edward Bunnell.
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Infant mortality / Edward Bunnell Phelps. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    c o o o o -4—» Q. E 03 CL LSHTM (P) -1910 Inrant Mortality JUiB^^SH^/ Phelps—Editor and Manager of the American Underwriter HAVE no^tkought of inflicting on you 0011316961 ^ the dull, dry facts of Infant Mortality statistics, but when we learn that for the last quarter of a century out of every hundred babies born in civilized countries throughout the world at least fifteen died in the first twelve-month, we can scarcely realize the real significance of this appall- ing fact. In order to visualize it, picture to yourselves a little circle of one hundred baby-carriages, or cots, in each of which is a newly-born baby, and then try to realize that before the end of the year fifteen of those baby-carriages or cots will be empty. If you can draw that picture in your minds, you will, perhaps for the first time, realize the solemn magnitude of the Infant Mortality problem which today confronts the world. To make the signif- icance still clearer, ask yourselves how many of the babies of the people you personally know, and with whom you personally associate, are numbered among those who die within one year after birth. I think your answer will be, practically none. Then taking into account the fact that the average for all newly-born babies—the average, bear in mind—is fifteen deaths for each one hundred born, what must be the infant death-rate among the babies of the poor and wretched? The statistics on that subject are too meagre to supply exact and definite information, but the infant mortality in the case of the so-called lower classes undoubtedly runs up to two, three, four or perhaps five hundred for each thousand births in some instances. in the formulation and promotion of any particular measure for the betterment of humanity, it is essential to establish, first, the fact—that is to say, the necessity for such a movement; secondly, the why, or apparent causes for that fact; and, thirdly, the how, or most promising means of abolishing those causes. It seems to me that this is the only natural, logical, and thoroughly sane course to pursue in the shaping of any such movement. In the matter of the Day Nursery movement, the primary fact is the enormous infant death-rate throughout the world, a death- rate which on the broad average, has been practically as unshaken and immutable ever since the figures have been collected as were the laws of the ancient Medes and Persians. As long ago as 1549, the city of Geneva, Switzerland, began the recording of births, marriages, and deaths in its own bailiwick, and made the startling discovery that 25.9 per cent of all its deaths each year were those of infants under one year of age. For this statement I have the authority of Mr. H. Llewellyn Heath's interesting book on The Infant, the Parent, and the State. published in London about four years since. As Mr. Heath points out. as recently as 1904 the infant deaths in England and Wales constituted about twenty-five per cent of all the deaths of those countries in that year, and by examination and tabulation of the official records of the New York City Board of Health I find that the average ratio of infant deaths to total deaths for the last decade in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx—the New York City of ante-consolidation days— has been between twenty-two and twenty- three per cent. Otherwise stated, in the face of the incalculable advance in the knowledge of pathology, hygiene and sanitation made in the last three hundred years, the infant mortality of such thoroughly civilized countries as England and the United States plays almost as commanding a part in the general death-rate of those countries as it did in that of far-away Geneva scarcely fifty years after Columbus discovered America, and that in the case of the metropolis of the new world which Columbus discovered, despite its veritable flood of charities, its philanthropic movements on lines almost innumerable, and all the admirable, and steadily-im- proving, work of its Board of Health! I believe that the Day Nursery is des- tined to develop into one of the most im- portant factors of the future in grappling with the infant mortality problem, the primary causes for which are ignorance and neglect. In part, at least, your work tends to dispel both. In the main, the mothers whose babies die like flies in their early months either do not know how to care for them, or by the stern decree of wage-earning necessity do not have the opportunity Address delivered at annual meeting of the Association of Day Nurseries of New York City, January 28, 1910, and reprinted from American Motherhood, Issue of February, 1911.