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In 2020 the child mortality rate is a very low 4 deaths per 1000 live births. In the 1850’s around the time John Hoodless and Elizabeth Millican lost two babies in early infancy, the mortality rate was at a huge 260 deaths per 1000 live births. Or roughly 26% of children were expected to die before they were five years old. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 and we see a rapid decline from the 1930’s as antibiotics were introduced into mainstream medicine.
Throughout the 19th Century disease caused by contaminated water was a major factor in these child deaths – cholera, dysentery, diphtheria, typhoid, polio and tuberculosis were all big killers as a result of dirty water, cross contamination from sewerage and lack of general sanitation. Viral infections such as smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella as well as scarlet fever, pertussis or whooping cough were all prone to cause epidemics as they ran their course unchecked at a time when vaccines were just beginning to be developed and introduced (smallpox 1853).
Given that the Hoodless babies were born into a very poor and rural setting, there would have been limited access to any medical services. It was often difficult for women to focus on breast feeding their children when they had to work hard every day to keep a household running with many heavy manual chores to do. Bottle feeding cows milk to an infant involved using pieces of cloth or sponge for the infant to suck the milk through from a container. This was highly unsanitary, the containers could not be properly sterilized and the cloths became a breeding ground for germs.
Often the cause of death for a small child would not even be recorded, so it is difficult to build an accurate picture of what the main killers were.
In 1848 there was a major cholera epidemic as people flooded into towns seeking work in the new fast growing industries. By 1851 cities were growing up around these industries and people drawn to the higher wages, lived in terrible, unsanitary, cramped conditions which contributed to the mortality rate. Ironically, the big industrialists driving the industrial era to bigger and bigger profits realised that it benefited and enabled them to continue making progress if they housed their workforce in better conditions. This led to some of the big names in Victorian industry, such as William Armstrong, George Cadbury and George Peabody, building better housing and planning towns to provide access to sanitation, schools and medical services and funding research into fighting disease.