How has mother/ child mortality evolved from pre industrial era?
Upvote:7
There have been 2 big changes in the Modern era that had major effects on public health during and immediately after childbirth.
The first was the increasing population density along with centralization of public health. This made industrializing nations slowly become better and better environments for disease. (We of course aren't rooting for the disease here, so this was a Bad Thing)
The second was the advent of modern medicine, which came into play around the beginning of the 20th Century. That had a gigantic positive impact on mortality of nearly every kind.
What this means in the data is that you should be seeing a slow increase of maternal and infant mortality throughout the early modern period, followed by a dramatic drop in both in the 20th Century.
Below are some data graphs I found covering this on Our World In Data.
This is a bit messy, because not a lot of people have collected data on this subject using methods that can be consistent over this kind of length of time. However, I'd suggest you look at the numbers for Germany, which show it going from about 35% in 1692, to 60% for the next 2 centuries, then down to about 23% at the end of that period. The global rate is now down to a historic low of 2.3%, with the vector still headed downwards.
Its perhaps a sad commentary on the historic status of women that numbers for maternal mortality seem to be even tougher to come by, but I did find some from the same outlet, sadly only going back to the mid 18th Century.
Finland is the line to watch here. What we see is a noisy but perceptible slow increase around the 0.8 to 1.0% range, then a drastic drop-off starting around the beginning of the 20th century, down to almost nothing now.
To give you a real-world illustration of what was going on, consider the story of maternity ward hand-washing. In 1846 Dr. Semmelweis at a hospital in Vienna decided to gather and study the data on that hospital's high maternal mortality (touchingly called "puerperal fever"). He found that his learned male doctors were five times more likely to lose patients than the hospital's midwives were. Midwives were of course the traditional caregivers for childbirth that pretty much everyone in pre-modern Europe used.
After looking into it, and trying several things (remember, this was before Germ Theory), he discovered that forcing his doctors to hand-wash and clean their instruments with bleach dramatically cut down on the deaths. So everyone just did that from then on, and oodles of lives were saved forever, right?
Well, no. What actually happened was that the doctors really resented having to do this, and particularly the implication that they were somehow unclean and killing their own patients. That got him really mad back at the doctors, with the eventual result was that he was fired. Then he tried evangelizing this approach with the medical community at large, to similar effect, this time ending up getting committed to an asylum. There he, ironically, died of sepsis.
More post
- 📝 Is there any precedent to Duterte's "Shoot them dead" call for policy violators in a Democracy?
- 📝 Why did Bavaria join Prussia/Germany instead of Austria?
- 📝 How did 15th century royals identify themselves in England/Spain?
- 📝 What were the original casualty projections for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- 📝 The Chronology Challenge: earliest verifiable date of a historical event?
- 📝 Why do navies like the US Navy name its ranks uniquely?
- 📝 When was the silk route active?
- 📝 How was Mao Anying killed?
- 📝 In a Nazi concentration, labor, or death camp, what was a "'sale' Appel"?
- 📝 How and why did Aleksotas became part of the Russian Empire in 1864?
- 📝 Was the Kingdom of Nri truly pacifistic?
- 📝 What is the longest name chain?
- 📝 Has there ever been an archbishop or bishop younger than the 16-year-old James of Nicosia?
- 📝 Spanish Influence on the Netherlands and Belgium?
- 📝 What does this acronym and the symbol in the middle represent?
- 📝 Why does the United States keep using "old" date representations and imperial system, while being in the minority?
- 📝 In WWI, How were the Germans able to maintain a submarine blockade of Britain?
- 📝 Where did Theophrastus write about a "a common chest" into which funds are placed in case of a member's hardship?
- 📝 Did 20th century militaries have their own fire-fighter units?
- 📝 When did Wang Mingzhang die?
- 📝 Was the Apostle the first Peter?
- 📝 How, and why, did Ancient Chinese hold banners displaying the type of work a person was undertaking?
- 📝 Help identify origin of a small clay statue
- 📝 Why is the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima so much more infamous than that of Nagasaki?
- 📝 Why did Canada retain the rank of Brigadier General? But not Australia, New Zealand, or UK?
- 📝 Why bother to attack in trench warfare?
- 📝 How frequent were murders by Mormon Danites in the 1850s?
- 📝 What are the earliest written accounts of Sub-Saharan Africa from the outside?
- 📝 What were the names of Amerigo Vespucci's ships?
- 📝 What is Street’s Jorrocks?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 How has mother/ child mortality evolved from pre industrial era?
- 📝 How would a 16-year-old girl from Cleopatra's era curse?
- 📝 How does the cost-benefit relationship of owning a horse differ today from the Middle Ages or Early Industrial Revolution?
- 📝 How do historians and linguists know how to pronounce the names from non-phonetic scripts?
- 📝 How did people distinguish slaves from free people in Ancient Rome?
- 📝 Identify the era or any other clues from this soldier's picture?
- 📝 How has hearing loss been avoided in war?
- 📝 How did the American Civil War help the U.S economy recover from the Panic of 1857 given that civil wars are extremely destructive?
- 📝 Has there ever been a major migration from the New World to the Old World? If not, why?
- 📝 How were horses disembarked from sail ships?
- 📝 How long was a sea journey from England to East Africa 1868-1877?
- 📝 How would a family travel from Indiana to Texas in 1911?
- 📝 How was titanium transported from Soviet Union to Area 51 for Oxcart?
- 📝 How difficult was to escape from a naval battle after engaging into one during the Age of Sail?
- 📝 Has there ever been a true kidnapped princess from anywhere in the world?
- 📝 How did people have access to ice in warm areas before the industrial revolution?
- 📝 How come every culture on the planet has a different calendar, yet follow the same system for a week?
- 📝 In the early 1900s, how did US politicians treat black dignitaries from other countries?
- 📝 How long did it take to get news of the sighting of the Spanish Armada from Land’s End to London?
- 📝 How and why did e.g. Chechnya differ in status from entities like Armenia?
- 📝 How was life in the Iron Age different from life in the Middle Ages?
- 📝 Were bookshops 'common' in the late 19th century, and how did they differ from modern ones?
- 📝 How did Quebec transition from French Law to English Law?
- 📝 How much did it cost to buy a ticket on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul in 1914?
- 📝 How much louder was a Napoleonic era cannon than a musket?
- 📝 How long would it take to travel from England to western Africa in the late 1890's?
- 📝 How is the discipline of History differentiated from other disciplines in social sciences or the humanities?
- 📝 How has Catalonia ended up being so nationalist?
- 📝 How many British navy officers were from lower classes at the end of 18th century?
- 📝 Why and how were east Brandenburg, Pomerania and Silesia taken away from Germany after WW2?