Wandering Adventure Party

@gwenh @cstross

But also my great-great aunt and uncle died with their mother of influenza in 1919 and my great aunt passed in 1941 of "childhood fever" my grandfather still remembers her and wonders who she would've grown up to be if she had lived.

@gwenh @cstross

"The early years of organized U.S. pediatrics were marked by a number of landmark advances in the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases of children, with substantial reduction in infant mortality rates, to 189/1000 live births in New York City in 1900, with rates as low as 147 in Chicago and as high as 311 in Biddeford, ME (5)."

@gwenh @cstross

"..., and they had yet to be impacted by the just-emerging scientific base of medicine. The science of bacteriology, founded on the landmark discoveries of Louis Pasteur in Paris, Robert Koch in Berlin, and others in the early 1880s, had not yet impacted child health."

@gwenh @cstross
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7086672/

"The infant mortality rate in 1880 in New York City, a particularly crowded urban area, was as high as 288 per 1000 live-born infants, primarily related to various infectious processes. Infectious diseases such as diarrhea, diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis dominated as the major causes of morbidity and mortality among children... "

@gwenh @cstross
so the death rate in the 1900's was after advances had been made in germ theory and communicable diseases.

It was even higher before 1880.