child mortality

[kylejustin]

i've been looking through the parish registers for ornes, in meuse, france. and at least 3 quarters of all children in the registers have a birth and burial on the same page. very few seem to make it to adulthood. the registers begin in 1668, and i have looked so far to 1730. of the children i see, the average seems to be that 3 or 4 children out of their siblings make it to adulthood. i know that in 1709-10 france had a crushing winter, but how do you explain the high mortality rate? i have never seen it this bad, in french or british registers. maybe the people weren't getting enough nutrients?

[margaretmarch]

Could have been an epidemic of some illness - even something as common as flu did kill people in those days and babies/children would have been very vulnerable especially if as you suggest there was a shortage of decent food.

Margaret

[kylejustin]

i shouldn't expect flu to kill off children all year round for decades though margaret. i don't know much of french history in the late 17th century, so i don't know if war depleted the country side, and maybe harsh winters came along as well? i know louis XIV was active in war as a middle aged man, but thought it was mostly spain he fought!

[Anne in Carlisle]

I wonder if it was some endemic pollution in the area? For example something in the water or some spoors in the air. No-one would have understood the cause and only the fittest babies would survive. I can't think of the examples just now but I have read about such events blighting an area.

Anne

[kylejustin]

thats interesting anne. it certainly is puzzling. i can't think of any good reason to explain the high rates for decades. if it was a year or 2, there'd be an explanation.

[Olde Crone Holden]

Until the 20th century, child mortality was something awful like 4 out of 5 children didn't reach adulthood. This was from a mixture of reasons but probably the major reason was that there was no medical treatment for even the simplest childhood ailment and only the absolute fittest survived - and the absolute fittest would have been amongst the best fed.

In my own tree, I have huge families of farming folk who breed and survive, only being seen off by accidents until the mid 1800s, when they moved into the towns and cities and died like flies. Presumably they had no resistance to the diseases caused by poverty, overcrowding, pollution and so on.

OC

[kylejustin]

that is also a very good reason oc. but ornes was a small village near verdun, which sadly does not exist anymore. it was destroyed in WWI. so it's a small village in the country with more children dying than adults. it's just off really. i know child mortality was high, but this village seems especially so.

[PhotoFamily]

I attended a lecture one time where we were challenged to think of the largest single contributors to lengthening life expectancy. As I recall, sanitation (and with it, safe water) and adequate nutrition were the two. I would add vaccination as #3, tho I'm not certain. Antibiotics are way down on the list.

Infantile dysentery remains one of the most dangerous illnesses for children in "developing" countries. Infants have so little water (just because of their size) that dysentery can dehydrate and kill them quite quickly.

If the village had an infected water supply (e.g., salmonella or cholera) from ill-placed sewages or out-houses, the water could have continued to sicken the most vulnerable for years.

[kylejustin]

that's a good point. and something that could account for the scale in the parish.