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Infant mortality in an ‘Age of Great Cities’: London and the English provincial cities compared, c. 1840–1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Naomi Williams  and
Graham Mooney
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Continuity and Change , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 185 - 212
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Law, C. M., ‘The growth of the urban population of England and Wales, 1801–1911’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41 (1967), 142.Google Scholar

2 Woods, R. I., Watterson, P. A. and Woodward, J. H., ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline in England and Wales, 1861–1921. Parts I and II’, Population Studies 42 (1988), 343–66, and 43 (1989), 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woods, R. I., ‘The effects of population redistribution on the level of mortality in nineteenth-century England and Wales’, Journal of Economic History 45 (1985), 645–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3 For instance, Nolan, C. M., ‘Infant mortality as an indicator of social and environmental change, 1880–1930: with special reference to Derby’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; Buchanan, I. H., ‘Infant mortality in British coal-mining communities, 1880–1911’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, London School of Economics, 1983)Google Scholar; Thompson, B., ‘Infant mortality in nineteenth-century Bradford’, in Woods, R. I. and Woodward, J. H. eds., Urban disease and mortality in nineteenth-century England (London, 1984), 120–47Google Scholar; and for London, Birmingham and Liverpool see Woods, , Watterson, and Woodward, , ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline. Part I’, 359–60.Google Scholar

4 The Municipal Borough of Blackburn, for instance, constituted only 51 per cent of the total RD population in 1851; in Bolton this figure was 53 per cent, whereas in Preston and Oldham the proportions were 72 per cent and 83 per cent respectively.

5 This makes the comparison of individual RDs over tirne problematic. For example, the population of Sheffield RD was only part of the total municipal population. To compare IMRs for Sheffield RD in the 1850s with those of the 1890s would be misleading because of class-specific mobility and the movement of middle-class inhabitants out of the RD area, into the neighbouring RD of Ecclesall Bierlow (which was also included within the municipal limits of the town). A full list of RDs which make up individual towns, together with a list of the boundary changes, can be found in Williams, N. J., ‘Infant and child mortality in urban areas of nineteenth-century England and Wales: a record-linkage study’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Liverpool, 1989), 192–8.Google Scholar

6 Examples of the way comparability is enhanced by combining RDs may be found in Laxton, P. and Williams, N. J., ‘Urbanization and infant mortality in England: a long term perspective and review’, in Nelson, M. C. and Rogers, J. eds., Urbanisation and the epidemiologic transition (Reports from the Family History Group, No. 9, Uppsala University, Sweden, 1989), 109–35.Google Scholar

7 24th Annual Report of the Registrar-General (London, 1863), 206–7.Google Scholar

8 For an example of this approach see Mooney, G., ‘Did London pass the “sanitary test”? Seasonal infant mortality in London, 1870–1914’, Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994), 158–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 In these three RDs institutional deaths accounted for over 50 per cent of all deaths in 1901. It is clear that IMRs in the remaining districts may be slightly under-stated, because they supplied ‘deaths’ to these three districts. We shall return to this issue shortly.

10 Szreter, S. R. S., ‘The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914’, Social History of Medicine 4 (1991), 435–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Eyler, J., Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (Baltimore, 1979).Google Scholar

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12 In the 1860s some rural RDs in eastern England had rather high levels of infant mortality in spite of their low population densities. It has been suggested that this was partly linked to the rather higher levels of illegitimate fertility in these places. See Woods, , Watterson, and Woodward, , ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline. Part I’, 356.Google Scholar

13 30th Annual Report of the Registrar-General (London, 1869), liii.Google Scholar

14 While the possibility cannot be discounted that some of these low rates were due to the ‘export’ of institutional deaths, Woods, Watterson and Woodward have also noted that by 1900 IMRs in suburban districts were as low as those in rural parts of southern England, whereas the IMRs for districts situated to the immediate west and east of the City equalled the worst northern towns.

15 In Table 4 Weber gives two estimates for the total number of cities in Germany and England. He does not account for this; however, it is likely that the number of cities in these urban categories increased during the period under observation and the two figures may reflect this.

16 The issue of London's lower mortality is discussed further in Woods, R. I., Williams, N. J. and Galley, C., ‘Infant mortality in England, 1550–1950: Problems in the identification of long-term trends, geographical and social variations’, in Corsini, Carlo A. and Viazzo, Pier Paulo eds., The decline of infant mortality in Europe, 1800–1950 (Florence: International Child Development Centre and Istituto degli Innocenti, 1993), 35–50.Google Scholar

17 As Weber noted in 1899 (Weber, A. F., The growth of cities in the nineteenth century: a study in statistics (first published 1899; reprinted by Cornell University Press, New York, 1963), 360–5).Google Scholar More recently, Francine van de Walle has suggested that in many European countries, ‘the larger the city, the higher the infant mortality rate’ (van de Walle, F., ‘Infant mortality and the European demographic transition’, in Coale, A. J. and Watkins, S. C. eds., The decline of fertility in Europe (Princeton, 1986), 216).Google Scholar

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20 Fildes, V., ‘Breast-feeding practices during industrialisation, 1800–1919’, in Falkner, F. ed., Infant and child nutrition. Worldwide issues and perspectives (Boston, 1991), 7Google Scholar; Hope, E. W., Report on the health of the city of Liverpool during 1906 (Liverpool, 1907), 51.Google Scholar In this Report, Dr Hope tabulates the incidence of diarrhoea at various ages under one year according to nationality and method of feeding, and concludes, ‘Artificial feeding of infants is, I believe, much more common amongst the poorer English than amongst their Irish neighbours of the same social scale. If this be so, it is a distinct advantage on the Irish side, and goes far to counterbalance disadvantages arising from their less satisfactory hygienic conditions’ (p. 53); Lancet, 20 June 1885, 1144; see also Marks, L. ‘“Dear old Mother Levy's”: the Jewish maternity home and Sick Room Helps Society 1895–1939’, Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), 61–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Woods, , Watterson, and Woodward, , ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline. Part II’, 116–19Google Scholar, and Fildes, V., ‘Breast-feeding in London, 1905–19’, Journal of Biosocial Science 24 (1992), 53–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 Davies, C., ‘The health visitor as mother's friend: a woman's place in public health, 1900–14’, Social History of Medicine 1 (1988), 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 An act to provide for the early notification of births, 7 Edw. VII c. 40. For an evaluation of how this Act operated in London, and its effects on infant mortality, see Mooney, , ‘Did London pass the “sanitary test”?’.Google Scholar

31 Newsholme, A., ‘Supplement in continuation of the second report on infant and child mortality’, 42nd Annual Report of the Local Government Board (1913), Cd. 6909, 185–382.Google Scholar

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37 Priestley, J., ‘Conservancy versus water carriage systems for the disposal of excreta’, Public Health (1895), 280.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 281.

39 Wohl, A. S., Endangered lives. Public health in Victorian Britain (London, 1984), 102.Google Scholar