My understanding is that the early 20th century is when sanitation and medicine started to become competent enough to prevent most childhood deaths. What were the childhood mortality rates per 1,000 before the early part of the 20th century in western europe (assuming the cutoff is about 6 years old)? What about places like Africa or Asia?
Was childhood mortality level from the dawn to cvilization until the early part of the 20th century (ie, was it steady at about 500 deaths before the age of 6 per 1,000 births) or did it flux greatly from Europe in the 12th century to europe in the 16th to Europe in the 18th century?
Well, i found a table for the United States that seems to give figures pretty close to the ones that i’ve seen in various US history books for the nineteenth century. The figures are in deaths per 1,000 live births per annum. From this site:
I’m sure you can get more detailed information for the US by going to the census.
If you do that, you might also be able to find out how, exactly, they define “infant” mortality for the purposes of these studies. Does this mean all children who died before the age of 6 months? 1 year? 3 years?
This stuff is important because, as E.P. Thompson points out in his classic history, The Making of the English Working Class, “the critical period in a child’s life was not 0-1 but 0-5.”
For example, Thompson gives figures for the industrial city of Sheffield where, in a five year period 1837 to 1842, there were 11,994 total deaths, of which 6,038 were of children under the age of 5. He breaks down the figures:
0-1 2,983
1 1,511
2-4 1,544
As you can see, while there are a lot of deaths in the first year, the next four years are also crucial.
Thompson also cites the Registrar-Generals Report on Manchester around the same time, which gives deaths in the 0-5 age group of 517 in 1,000. Also,
It’s worth noting that aggregate figures sometimes quoted for nineteenth century infant mortality rates often hide as much as they reveal. As Thompson notes in his book, rates of infant mortality were much higher for working class familes than for those of the bourgeoisie and upper classes. Inadequate diets, greater exposure to disease and infection, and the tendency of poor women to keep working at physically arduous jobs right up until giving birth all mitigated against the health of working class infants.
This applied to average age at death also, of which infant mortality is an important factor, because a high infant mortality rate brings average life expectancy down considerably. Thompson gives the average age at death for different classes in six different regions:
Place Gentry Tradesmen Labourers
Rutlandshire 52 41 38
Truro 40 33 28
Derby 49 38 21
Manchester 38 20 17
Bethnal Green 45 26 16
Liverpool 35 22 15
Now, as Thompson’s earlier observations about the importance of the 0-5 period suggest, if a working class infant managed to survive past its fifth birthday, it had a pretty good chance of living a reasonably long life by the standards of the time. That is, despite the figures given above, Liverpool did not have an epidemic of laborers keeling over at age 15. Rather, there were large numbers of deaths very early in life, and a large number after the age of 40 or so, leading to an average age of death for laborers of 15. Sort of an inverted bell curve.
Note: all reference to Thompson come from E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 325-331.
By the way, i realize that you were looking for longer-term statistics than the ones i gave, but i do modern history, and this is the stuff i’m more familiar with, and that i have access to.