View report page

INFANTILE MORTALITY
It is a sad truth that for many years to come some babies will
die before the age of 1 year every year. Sometimes we take statistics
for granted; perhaps a quotation from that well-known publicist Paul De
Kruif may illuminate the statistics.
"I was told that when you begin to be bothered by the passing
away of children who don't have to die, your worry may be assuaged by
biometrics. My friend, the distinguished biometrician Dr. Raymond Pearl
of the Johns Hopkins, proved to me that this parade of more and more little
white caskets has its bright side. Dr. Pearl was such a physically huge man
and so judicious in talking, that he made you believe him. He pointed out
that biometric science only concerns itself with the fate of the human race
as an animal species. Forget that those little white coffins hold somebody's
hopes, somebody's baby son or daughter, or brother or sister. That is
sentiment, but not science. Didn't I realise that it has been proved by
slide-rule biometric science, that when you cut down the dying of small
babies, if those babies hadn't died when they were very tiny, then more of
their cohort born that year would be sure to perish in the years to follow.
You only postpone the job of the undertaker by cutting down infant mortality.
"Did this hold for older children as well? I dug back into
Michigan records of young lives that had begun in the boom days. Here were
three miserable little brothers. They had been born in 1922, 1924, 1926,
amid the bull market uproar when Detroit promised to be permanently hard,
bright and dynamic. We probed into the lives of these three little boys
in 1928. They were certainly not fit to keep living. Their father was a
victim of paresis; their mother had broken down with dementia-praecox. If
you had entered the shack where these three wan waifs lived you would have
found the spindly legged rickety boys gnawing at crusts of mouldy bread.
"Now it is 1930 and the three little boys must surely be dead
because of their deplorable heredity. Now they have the luck to come to
the notice of the Children's Aid Society of Detroit, which has money to
help maybe one out of every thousand children who are forlorn. When found
by the Aid Society, the three little boys had the colour of fungi. If saved
now, they would surely die later. But the workers of the Children's Aid
Society were ignorant of biometrics.
"Now it is 1934 and when you see these youngsters you would swear
they were not the same children at all. They live on a farm in the care of
a foster mother and father. They raise garden crops on their own plots of
ground. They are hungry all the time, but it is from fishing and swimming
in the summer and sliding downhill in the winter, and they have all the
milk, meat, green vegetables, and eggs their stomachs can hold. The kindness
of their foster parents has built this food into their straight, strong,
tanned bodies. Who is going to say they will die next year because they
were saved three years ago." Paul De Kruif - The Sweeping Wind.