Fewer dead babies

A follow up to Andrew's post on Victorian death images notes:

In regards to the Victorian post-mortem photographs, notice how very, very many of them are children. Sometimes infants, sometimes toddlers or school-age kids, but children. Not teenagers who might have been working (it was the Victorian era, after all), not young adults who might have died by violence that perhaps they might have been partially responsible for. Children. I'm an ICU physician in a busy pediatric intensive care unit. I've seen enough children die to last me the rest of my or anybody else's life. I'm as aware as anyone what an awful, nearly-irrecoverable mess we in this country have made of the environment, of national and global politics, of the economy.

But one thing tells me that there's a chance for humanity - so many fewer dead children.

The thing that struck me is how sickly the children in the photos are, dead and living. Oversized heads, pinched faces, scrawny bodies. Presumably the legacy of poorer nutrition and endemic disease. It's really astonishing how lucky today's Americans have been in both time and space.

Comments

Lucky, hell! Maybe it's the direct result of improvements in basic hygiene, waste collection and disposal, water treatment, vaccinations, medical improvements and, yes, much better environmental living conditions.

Posted by zoot fenster | May 2, 2008 12:30 PM

Yup. My grandparents had nine children, four of whom died in infancy. Nobody thought that was unusual. Then penicillin and the like were invented. Fortunately, we didn't have products liability law and stringent FDA requirements for approval back then. Now we mostly live long enough to spend our many declining years griping about the high cost of drugs.

Posted by Alan Gunn | May 2, 2008 1:25 PM

Striking and painful.

These also make me grateful for widespread ownership of cameras. In the very rare cases where American children die, parents tend to already have many pictures of them while alive. They can avoid taking a small corpse in their arms to the man in town to create their only piece of memorabilia of a life they were close to. How brutal that must have been.

Posted by Michael B | May 2, 2008 1:46 PM

zoot,

She's saying that you are lucky to be born here and now, rather than say medieval Europe or present day Zimbabwe, because you get to benefit from all those improvements that you didn't personally cause.

She's not downplaying the role of those actions, quite the contrary. But you can't personally take credit for all those actions just 'cause you were born an American.

Posted by Geoff | May 2, 2008 2:03 PM

what an awful, nearly-irrecoverable mess we in this country have made of the environment, of national and global politics, of the economy

Is Sullivan living in a completely different world than I am?

Does he have simply no concept of history (political or environmental) or economics?

Is he simply vastly ignorant of, say, the pollution of air, water, and land in the Victorian era as opposed to the current one?

Is he equally ignorant of the "mess" national and global politics were in for, well, every period of time since the dawn of recorded history?

(Answer: Apparently "yes" to all of the above.)

Posted by Sigivald | May 2, 2008 2:06 PM

That was Sullivan's reader writing, not Sullivan.

Posted by Led | May 2, 2008 2:17 PM

"She's saying that you are lucky to be born here and now, rather than say medieval Europe or present day Zimbabwe, because you get to benefit from all those improvements that you didn't personally cause."

Not me. I was rewarded with this slot because I invented crop rotation in a previous life.

Posted by Njorl | May 2, 2008 2:20 PM

Not me. I was rewarded with this slot because I invented crop rotation in a previous life.

Ah, touche. I guess the "you're just lucky you were born American" argument cannot be used by those who believe in reincarnation, as they accept responsibility for their own birth...

Posted by Geoff | May 2, 2008 3:30 PM

Andrew Sullivan fell off the deep end over Abu Grahib nonsense. Total lack of perspective.

Posted by FreedomLover | May 2, 2008 3:44 PM

I was awarded this slot because I invented crop circles in a previous life. And I tell ya, a glossy fur coat is an amazing thing to have.

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | May 2, 2008 6:05 PM

Geoff, you're right. I know Megan is too libertarian to believe in luck. But I had no idea of the overachievers, in this life and past, who inhabit this blog. I'm still in my first learning session. Thanks to all who had babies in the 1800s along with your other accomplishments.

Posted by zoot fenster | May 2, 2008 8:19 PM

"Fewer dead babies" = fewer dead baby jokes.

What's the difference between a truckload of dead babies and a truckload of bowling balls?

You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork.

Posted by Peter | May 2, 2008 11:21 PM

Who says libertarians don't believe in luck? Or do you have them confused with Zoroastrians?

Posted by jfalk | May 3, 2008 9:18 AM

Sorry, Megan, I don't see your premise. I see no evidence, in that collection, of "sickly children." The dead kids look more-or-less normal to me -- round pudgy baby-fatted faces, limbs non-skeletal. Several photos pose a dead infant surrounded by its surviving siblings, all of whom appear to my eye healthy by modern standards.

Posted by db | May 3, 2008 1:27 PM

The point is that vaccination and other similar technological advances have reduced the infant mortality rate from around 50% to negligible. All those dead kids, today, wouldn't have been dead at all.

The ignoramuses who rant against vaccines have no idea what the pre-vaccination world was like. This posting is a reminder of that.

Posted by Infidel753 | May 4, 2008 7:24 PM

"Fortunately, we didn't have products liability law and stringent FDA requirements for approval back then."

Unfortunately, they also had very little in the way of public health codes, public sanitation, state-subsidized medical research, or vaccination programs. They also had an overabundance of twits who believed that an unregulated marketplace would deliver an ideal set of conditions for public health without any meddling by the state.

Fortunately, we are now only cursed with the latter.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 5, 2008 1:58 PM

re: Infidel753 (May 4, 7:24)

Megan's premise is that the photos show sickly corpses of children having "oversized heads, pinched faces, scrawny bodies."

Honestly, is that how you would characterize those children (both living and dead)? They all look pretty normal to me. Remember, all babies have disproportionately large heads, relative to adults. Megan's "pinched faces" seem to me merely the somber expressions normal for Victorian-era photography: nobody smiles in 19th-century photos, in part because it's impossible to hold still with a pleasant-looking forced smile for the minute or more necessary for a good exposure of the photographic plates. Their limbs appear slender and healthy to my eye, not scrawny or skeletal.

Whether or not the linked photos support the conclusion, I think we agree that modern medicine gives today's kids a much better chance for surviving disease and injury.

Posted by db | May 5, 2008 4:58 PM