Monday, June 9, 2025

Eleanor Scott On Infant Mortality Rates

I am currently doing some research on infant baptism and infant mortality in antiquity. This is important for Moroni 8 and the practice in Mesoamerica. Here are some important excerpts from a work on the archaeology of infants and infant mortality: 


Infant mortality rates therefore differ markedly throughout the world and are affected by a variety of cultural and environmental factors. Not all these factors are necessarily couched within the arena of the western medicalization of childbirth. In the developing world one of the main killers of newborn babies is the coercion of their mothers into using formula rather than breast milk. Formula milk must be mixed with clean water and served up in sterile bottles with sterile teats, or the baby runs the risk of developing gastro-enteritis, a potentially fatal condition in infants. As clean water and sterile conditions are difficult to obtain for many women in developing countries, the result has been the deaths of millions of babies, at infant mortality rates as high as 250+ per thousand lives births. The effects of feeding methods on infant survival rates is often not fully appreciated. Kevill-Davies’s observation that the Dublin Foundling Hospital which attempted to hand-raise over ten thousand babies between the years 1775 and 1796 had only 45 successes—a 99.6 percent mortality rate—is relevant here (Havill-Davis 1991, 40). Prior to the advent of successful bottle feeing this century, infants whose mothers had died and abandoned “foundling” infants required the attentions of a “wet nurse”—a woman who could breastfeed the baby—if it were to stand any chance of survival. (Eleanor Scott, The Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death [BAR International Series 819; Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2016], 31)

 

 

However, irrespective of feeding issues, a high mortality rate in antiquity and prehistory is to be expected simply through disease and accident. What would be considered a minor bout of diarrhea in an adult is frequently fatal in a small baby. Colds and ever lead to overheating and are now known to be a significant factor in cot death. Similarly, the newborn—especially those born prematurely—cannot cope with cold temperatures, and its immature immune system does not deal adequately with exposure to viruses and bacteria, and the infant can succumb to all quickly to infection. Any congenital defect which would affect the ability to feed, such as severe cleft palate or pyloric stenosis, might result in the death of the infant by slow starvation. Accidents and predation can and do happen. Infants are dropped, shaken, smothered, burnt and savaged by dogs, their delicate tissues and skulls unable to survive even minor blows and traumas. I has been estimated that infant mortality in prehistoric and mediaeval Scandinavia may have been as high as 50% of all births (this would include stillbirths) (Welinder 1979, 83; Wicker 1997, 12). (Eleanor Scott, The Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death [BAR International Series 819; Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2016], 31-32)

 

 

 

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