[Report 1950] / Medical Officer of Health, Barnsley County Borough.

  • Barnsley (England : Unitary authority). County Borough Council.
Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1950] / Medical Officer of Health, Barnsley County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Place of Death Details hospital 10 days and took her own discharge against medical advice at the end of this time. Re-admitted to hospital at 26th week with failure of cardiac compensation. Premature onset of labour 35th week. Caesarian section and delivery of premature living child. Patient died some nine hours later. Cause of death : Pulmonary Oedema; Mitral Stenosis; Pregnancy. No. 3 Hospital Patient, who was a primipara, aged 19, booked for hospital and attended the ante-natal clinic regularly from, an early stage of pregnancy. No abnormality was detected during pregnancy apart from slight varicose veins of the right leg. She was admitted to hospital in the first stage of labour and was delivered of a full-term female child. Puerperium was normal for the first 10 days. On the 11th day patient devoloped a temperature of 100°F. Chemiotherapy and antibiotic treatment were instituted and the patient was normal again on the 15th day. She remained in hospital. On the 21st day after confinement she collapsed when going to the toilet and died in 15 minutes. Cause of death : Acute pulmonary embolism; Superficial thrombo- phlebitis of the leg, associated with pregnancy. No comment is offered beyond suggesting that there appears to be some need for wider education of the public in matters relating to mother- hood. Comparison between the occurrence of the causes of maternal mortality in Barnsley during the year with those prevailing in England and Wales as a whole is shown in Table VI. INFANTILE MORTALITY During 1950 there was a total of 50 deaths of children under one year of age. This compares with a total of 59 in 1949. When reduced to an infant mortality figure ” of deaths per 1,000 live births, the figure so obtained is 34.6. That for England and Wales is 29.8, and that for the 126 Great Towns is 33.8. Whilst it would be more pleasing to be able to report that the Barnsley figure was lower rather than higher than the national average, there is some satisfaction in finding, by reference to Table IIa, that it is following the general downward trend even though the fall is not so rapid as elsewhere., A detailed analysis of the various causes of death in infants under one year of age is shown in Table VII along with the age at which the deaths occurred. Table VIII gives a detailed ten year comparison of the four principal causes of infantile mortality.