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After the passing of the 1902 Midwives Act, a growing proportion of women were delivered by trained and supervised midwives. Standards of midwifery should therefore have improved over the first three decades of the twentieth century, yet nationally this was not reflected in the main outcome measures (stillbirths, early neonatal mortality and maternal death). This paper shows that there was a difference in the risks associated with delivery by the different attendants, with qualified midwives having the best outcome, then bona-fide (untrained) midwives and lastly doctors, even when account is taken of the fact that doctors were called in cases of medical need and may have been booked where a problematic delivery was expected. The paper argues that the lack of improvement in outcome measures could be consistent with improving standards of care among both trained and bona-fide midwives, because increased attention to the rules stipulating when midwives called for medical help meant that a doctor was called into an increasing number of deliveries (including less complicated ones), raising the chance of unnecessary and dangerous interventions.

This paper examines influences on post-neonatal mortality in Derbyshire (England) in the early twentieth century, by applying multivariate hazard analysis to a rare individual-level data set. The data allow detailed patterns of breastfeeding and weaning to be examined. The role of feeding is given special attention as a mediator between mortality and the other environmental, social, and demographic factors considered. Twins and illegitimate children were more likely to have been hand-fed, but this could explain only a small fraction of their increased vulnerability. Artificial feeding was associated with increased risks of death from diseases was predominantly the result of the greater likelihood of congenitally weak children being hand-fed. Most of the variation in post-neonatal mortality, particularly from respiratory disease, was explained by environmental influences - population density, altitude, and the presence of mining.

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines' observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across different types of place, and that some of the mortality differences by social class might actually reflect the contextual effects of healthy and unhealthy places. Although this line of argument has received a considerable amount of attention in health geography literature, it has rarely been examined for a specific historic period, and then only within particular urban areas. In this paper, we apply multi-level models to a complete count individual-level dataset of the 1911 census of England and Wales, comparing influences on infant and child mortality at the level of the individual couple and for two spatial levels. We find that although most variation in infant and child mortality operates at the individual level, there is also important variation at the two spatial levels and part of the mortality differences between social classes is better explained by the areas in which people lived rather than by their social class. A consideration of independent variables at all three levels suggests that different spatial scales capture different sorts of influences on early age mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causes of infant mortality for the port town of Ipswich between 1872 and 1909. Ipswich is the only town in England for which a complete run of computer-readable, individual-level causes of death are available in the late 19th and early 20th century. Our work makes use of the ICD10h coding system being developed to contribute to two projects: Digitising Scotland (University of Edinburgh) and SHiP -- Studying the history of Health in Port Cities (Radboud University, Nijmegen). We consider annual and quinquennial mortality rates amongst Ipswich's youngest residents by age, sex, seasonality and cause. The individual causes of death not only offer insight into conditions in the town, but also highlight questions concerning how best to interpret the information provided when both medical terminology and registration practices were changing over the decades of the study. Ipswich infant mortality rates very closely mirrored those of England as a whole, rather than the most unhealthy large cities, such as Liverpool or Manchester. It becomes clear that birth itself was a major cause of neonatal, even some post-neonatal, deaths. While waterfood borne diseases killed large numbers in the summer months, it was the ever-present airborne diseases which carried off a greater number of small victims. Although the records offer a rich vein of data to explore, some causes of death, such as convulsions and teething, remain enigmatic and require further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses detailed records relating to feeding and health for a large sample of infants born in Derbyshire in the early twentieth century to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture than has previously been possible of the extent and duration of breast-feeding, reasons for ceasing to feed and the dangers of feeding in the early twentieth century. Results indicate that breast-feeding was the norm among working class British women in the early twentieth century, but the social gradient was the inverse to that found in Britain today. However this disguises much individual variation and early weaning was more common among twins, illegitimate infants, first births, and women in poor health, which placed infants at greater risk of death from many causes of death, but particularly gastro-intestinal infections. There is evidence that health visitors were successful both in promoting breast-feeding and in supporting safe hand-feeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of siblings sharing identical first names in various regions of Great Britain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It particularly comments on parts of North-West Britain, including the Western Isles and the Isle of Skye. The authors explore evidence from birth registers and census returns. They link patterns of name sharing to child deaths and infant mortality rates (IMR). Patterns of naming children after relatives, including parents and grandparents, are also considered.