Questionable stats? (19th century stuff --Sorta OT)

ChocolateChip_Wookie wrote:
Presumably that was Princess Vicky, since none of Victoria's other
daughters had, so far as I recall, 8 children. (I think Alice had 6 or
7, Helena and Beatrice about 4, and Louise none at all.)



Ooops, clumsy phraseology....the Great Grandmother with 8 children was
my own and no relation to Queen Victoria or her daughters. I have a copy
of my maternal ancestors will, not the will made by Victorias' daughter.
I know the will existed for Victoria's daughter but cannot recall which
one, it's one of those half remembered facts you pick up idly watching
the History Channel. I would be happy to be corrected if anyone has the
correct citation - I think it was the daughter she sent the chloroform to.


I WAS a little confused there. Thanks for clearing it up.

It still would have been Vicky, I think. I know Victoria she sent
along some chloroform for the first birth (along with her own midwife
and her own doctor). And Vicky did, in fact, almost die during her
first delivery, but not from infection. The baby was breach, and since
the first doctors to arrive were too delicate to actually do an
internal exam, she labored ineffectually for quite some time before
anyone discovered the problem. (At which point she was given the
chloroform (not used until then because the German doctor wasn't
famliar with it and the English doctor knew that if Vicky died from ANY
cause, the blame would fall firmly on HIS shoulders), and the baby was
turned and pulled out manually. (Notices had already been sent along
to the newspapers reporting the death of both mom and baby since
everyone was sure she WOULDN'T survive.)

I've read a lot about this particular royal family. Don't remember
seeing anything specific about a will but again, I'm sure it would not
have been an unusual thing, but not because the risk of dying was that
extremely high.

Naomi

Wookie

Ericka Kammerer wrote:
ChocolateChip_Wookie wrote:

In conclusion therefore, I would be inclined to believe the statistics
- horrifying as they are to our modern eyes. Women did frequently die
of puerpural fever, it was very common, so common in fact that women
routinely organised their affairs before going into labour. Just
finally, in the years 1994 - 1996 there were 16 recorded deaths from
puerpural fever in the UK [Report Department of Health, 'Why women
die']. Go ask your midwife if she knows what it is and what the signs
are....I doubt she does. Arrogance breeds ignorance. Just because we
have antibiotics, doesnt mean that puerpural fever has been
irradicated...it hasnt.

A 15 or 35 percent *per pregnancy* mortality rate
(depending on how you parse things) might be an accurate
statistic for a particular hospital during an epidemic
or something, but I can't find *anything* *anywhere* that
lists even a total maternal mortality rate that high
for the mid-nineteenth century. Sweden was on the low
end with something like a rate of 5 or 6 per thousand.
The *highest* rate I can find anywhere is less than
10 percent, and that was in a particular clinic with all
the high risk practices for puerperal fever. There's
just no way that the national maternal
mortality rate due to puerperal fever could be even 15
percent/pregnancy, much less 35 percent. Reports in
the US show a much lower rate of maternal mortality.
While the trend was moving toward the hospitalization
of birth, by the mid-nineteenth century, most births
were still at home in the US, with much lower maternal
mortality rates.
If there truly were a national 15 percent
mortality rate, with an average of somewhere around
6 deliveries per woman at that time in the US, that
would mean that an average woman would have had more than a
60 percent chance of dying of childbirth at some
time in her life. That's just clearly ludicrous.
Also, why on earth would you assume that a
midwife wouldn't know the signs and symptoms of
puerperal fever? That boggles the mind.

Best wishes,
Ericka

I doubt there are any 'combined' statistics for a country as a whole.
Until recently (withing 100 years) there was no central register of
birth/death/marriage...there were parish records, but these were often
innacurate, destroyed or not kept up to date. With regard to America,
the following website might be of interest...

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/his...childbirth.cfm

Wookie

wrote:
Cataloging a book at work today I ran across a statistic that has me
VERY puzzled. It was a book about public health history and the quote
read, "In 1857, 24 out of every 54 pregnancies in the U.S. resulted in
post-partum puerperal fever ... as a result o fpuerperal fever, 19 out
of every 54 pregnancies proved lethal to the mother. Given that most
women at that time gave birth to more than 6 children, the risk of
premature death over the course of their reproductive lives was
enormous."

That 54 is the most puzzling to me. Why on earth would anyone give a
statistic in terms of fifty-fours? I suspect an editing error, perhaps
a finger too quick on the search-and-replace function.

I'll ask my microbiologist sister.

--Helen

At which point she was given the
chloroform (not used until then because the German doctor wasn't
famliar with it and the English doctor knew that if Vicky died from ANY
cause, the blame would fall firmly on HIS shoulders), and the baby was
turned and pulled out manually.

Victoria sent the chloroform to her as a 'new' innovation (that, I do
remember). Until then, the use of chloroform for labour was not
considered because it was thought that the 'lusty cries of the mother'
were a good thing. Pain in childbirth was considered God's punishment
for Eve's sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Women
were merely advised to "arm themselves with patience" and prayer and to
try, during labor, to restrain "those dreadful groans and cries which do
so much discourage their friends and relations that are near them." In
general, doctors believed that the pain wasn't that bad, didnt warrant
the use of chloroform and in any case it's natures' way and one shouldnt
interfere with God's intentions. Bizarre I know. We all know it hurts
like bu****ry and no doubt so did the midwives who had all had children
of their own and understood, they were overuled by their more 'educated'
male counterparts.

By the way...I dont have a downer on men honest (having re-read some of
my posts, it might seem like that), I do have a downer on the medical
profession, particularly the earlier medical and male dominated
profession who seemed to presume that since they were men, they knew
what they were talking about, whereas uneducated wisewomen are little
better than witchdoctors. Even today, I've met a number of male gynies
who seem to believe that this is all a *mdeical* situation that requires
medical intervention and that I as a woman couldnt possibly understand
their lofty medical arguments. Argh.

Wookie

ChocolateChip_Wookie wrote:
At which point she was given the
chloroform (not used until then because the German doctor wasn't
famliar with it and the English doctor knew that if Vicky died from ANY
cause, the blame would fall firmly on HIS shoulders), and the baby was
turned and pulled out manually.

Victoria sent the chloroform to her as a 'new' innovation (that, I do
remember). Until then, the use of chloroform for labour was not
considered because it was thought that the 'lusty cries of the mother'
were a good thing. Pain in childbirth was considered God's punishment
for Eve's sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

It was newish by the time Vicky's first child was born, but not brand
new. Victoria herself had had Chloroform for the birth of her 8th
child, Leopold, about 6 years before. (And then again for her last
child, Beatrice.) Even before that time it had been used occassionally
for complicated deliveries, but once Victoria used it (and liked it),
it suddenly became fashionable in England, and other upperclass mothers
began requesting it. It took longer for it to be commonly used
elsewhere. (It also required a doctor skilled in its use to administer
it, and since most women were, of course, tended by midwives, it simply
wasn't available to the great majority of mothers.

Pain in child-birth (and in surgery) was also considered to be useful.
When ether first became available for surgery, some doctors didn't want
to use it, because they believed that the shock of the pain (and
adrenaline release) accompanying surgery actually enhanced recovery.
And for childbirth ... well ... it WAS fairly dangerous, since the
techniques for administering the stuff (both ether and chloroform) were
pretty primative at that point. And since women didn't tend to die
from pain in childbirth, most doctors were hesitant to give it for
practical medical reasons, except in the most complicated situations.
(i.e., the need to relax the mother for version). But, of course,
mothers began to insist, so the doctors gave in.

Naomi

" wrote in message
oups.com...

wrote:
Cataloging a book at work today I ran across a statistic that has me
VERY puzzled. It was a book about public health history and the quote
read, "In 1857, 24 out of every 54 pregnancies in the U.S. resulted in
post-partum puerperal fever ... as a result o fpuerperal fever, 19 out
of every 54 pregnancies proved lethal to the mother. Given that most
women at that time gave birth to more than 6 children, the risk of
premature death over the course of their reproductive lives was
enormous."

That 54 is the most puzzling to me. Why on earth would anyone give a
statistic in terms of fifty-fours? I suspect an editing error, perhaps
a finger too quick on the search-and-replace function.

I'll ask my microbiologist sister.

--Helen


Did he base his study on only 54 women perhaps?

wrote:
wrote:
Cataloging a book at work today I ran across a statistic that has me
VERY puzzled. It was a book about public health history and the quote
read, "In 1857, 24 out of every 54 pregnancies in the U.S. resulted in
post-partum puerperal fever ... as a result o fpuerperal fever, 19 out
of every 54 pregnancies proved lethal to the mother. Given that most
women at that time gave birth to more than 6 children, the risk of
premature death over the course of their reproductive lives was
enormous."

That 54 is the most puzzling to me. Why on earth would anyone give a
statistic in terms of fifty-fours? I suspect an editing error, perhaps
a finger too quick on the search-and-replace function.

I'd posted a message last night that didn't seem to have made it
through where I also commented on this. It sounds like a typo or
copyediting error somewhere along the line. (Though the reviews of the
book on Amazon often note that it's riddled with errors, so this is
probably not the only one.) But perhaps it should have been 24 out of a
thousand.

Naomi


I'll ask my microbiologist sister.

--Helen

"John Mackintosh, writing in the 1820s, commented that "there is not
a corner in Britain where this formidable disease has not made many
mourners",11, but observed that a number of particular epidemics had
become famous as a result of having been recorded and then repeatedly
described in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century treatises on the
subject. Alongside the Paris epidemic of 1745/6 and the London epidemic
of 1760/1, he cited the 1768 and 1770 epidemics in London and other
parts of England; the prolonged epidemic in Aberdeen from 1789-92
recorded by Alexander Gordon;12, and the epidemics in Leeds and
Sunderland described respectively by William Hey and John Armstrong.13,
Case fatality rates had varied enormously. For example, it was reported
that, during the epidemic at the Westminster Lying-in Hospital in 1770,
out of sixty-three women delivered, nineteen contracted the disease and
thirteen of these died. In the Aberdeen epidemic, out of seventy-seven
patients with the disease, twenty-eight died. However, Mackintosh also
observed that, during an epidemic in the Lying-in Ward of the Edinburgh
Infirmary "many years ago", all who contracted the disease died.14,
The wide variations in the reports of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century authors make it impossible for a modern researcher
to reconstruct accurately the incidence, mortality or case fatality
rates for this disease.15,"

This is from an article my sister sent me, the full text of which can
be found at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/art...?artid=1088248 . It
doesn't directly answer the question, of course, but makes it seem
likely that the author was actually quoting the account of such an
epidemic, and accidentally generalized it to the state of affairs *in
general* in the US in 1857. If the author is who I think she is, I'm
very surprised she made such a mistake, and I rather hope it's due to
some other secondary source having gotten it wrong, or else due to an
editing error as I suggested before.

--Helen

ChocolateChip_Wookie wrote:

I doubt there are any 'combined' statistics for a country as a whole.
Until recently (withing 100 years) there was no central register of
birth/death/marriage...there were parish records, but these were often
innacurate, destroyed or not kept up to date.

There are quite a few studies looking at maternal
mortality in the US in that time frame. There may not have
been a national registry, but there are quite a few local
records, whether from clinics or doctors or midwives or
what have you that scholars have studies. Put them together
and you get a fairly representative idea of what was going on
at the time. It is well known to be the case that the
overwhelming majority of births were not in hospitals
at that time, and that hospital births posed the greatest
risk of puerperal fever.

With regard to America,
the following website might be of interest...

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/his...childbirth.cfm

And that website also does not show maternal
mortality rates anywhere near as high as the one in the OP.

Best wishes,
Ericka

I doubt there are any 'combined' statistics for a country as a whole.
Until recently (withing 100 years) there was no central register of
birth/death/marriage...there were parish records, but these were often
innacurate, destroyed or not kept up to date.

In the UK, the central register began in 1838, records were made at local
registry offices, then compiled centrally and bound into books for each
quarter of the year ordered alphabetically. At some point someone began
typing all these up, last time I went to the central record office in
London, the earliest ones were typed, but the late 19th century was still
handwritten on it's old paper, I presume that duplicate copies exist,
otherwise there would be no way those originals would be available for all
to handle! From about 1984, the records were then put together annually, but
that's too much for one book, so the year ends up being split
alphabetically, there is also a much longer delay in getting the book
together, so if you need copies of records less than 18mths old, you have to
obtain them from the local office. Cause of death should be recorded on
death certificates, so in theory it would be possible to get a reasonably
accurate count for any given year, but it would be a huge amount of work, so
likely other methods are going to be used to estimate it.

Cheers

Anne