On the mortality of childbed and maternity hospitals / by J. Matthews Duncan.

Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the mortality of childbed and maternity hospitals / by J. Matthews Duncan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    a desire of the recording practitioner to conceal or delude; but no one knows how many may be omitted because the recording practitioner does not deem it right to record his case as one justly belonging to either category, or vice versa; and the practitioner cannot be found fault with, for he has no unexception- able rule of guidance. To show what sources of error in the registrars' reports are hidden from observation, I shall quote from Dr. Barnes a passage bringing one to light from a single locality :— It is stated, says he, in the Eegistrar-General's Eeport for 1856, that the mortality in childbirth in England and Wales in 1847 was 1 in 167, and that it had fallen to 1 in 227 in 1856. Now, having applied to Dr. Elkington for the puer- peral statistics of Birmingham, T learn that the registrar of that town says that 'no one ever specifies the deaths in childbed or from puerperal fever! !!' ' Trusting too implicitly to tables of mortality and registrars' reports, a student might be led to adopt such an absurd notion as that the mortality of child- bed had been reduced from 1 in 167 in 1847 to 1 in 227 in 1856 in England and Wales. Like unfounded and improbable views as to the progress of midwifery have been so often repeated as to appear now to be generally believed. The paradox referred to, like many others, is based on statistics, and I shall not * See Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, voL xxviii., 1859 p. 103.