attention that wealth could command and science could furnish.
If the infant mortality problem is to be solved on the basis of
knowledge and reason, it must be recognized that sanitation and hygiene
can not take the place of eugenics any more than eugenics can dispense
with sanitation and hygiene. It must be recognized that the death-rate
in childhood is largely selective, and that the most effective way to
cut it down is to endow the children with better constitutions. This can
not be done solely by any euthenic campaign; it can not be done by
swatting the fly, abolishing the midwife, sterilizing the milk, nor by
any of the other panaceas sometimes proposed.
But, it may be objected, this discussion ignores the actual facts.
Statistics show that infant mortality campaigns _have_ consistently
produced reductions in the death-rate. The figures for New York, which
could be matched in dozens of other cities, show that the number of
deaths per 1,000 births, in the first year of life, has steadily
declined since a determined campaign to "Save the Babies" was started:
1902 181
1903 152
1904 162
1905 159
1906 153
1907 144
1908 128
1909 129
1910 125
1911 112
1912 105
1913 102
1914 95
To one who can not see beyond the immediate consequences of an action,
such figures as the above indeed give quite a different idea of the
effects of an infant mortality campaign, than that which we have just
tried to create. And it is a great misfortune that euthenics so often
fails to look beyond the immediate effect, fails to see what may happen
next year, or 10 years from now, or in the next generation.
We admit that it is possible to keep a lot of children alive who would
otherwise have died in the first few months of life. It is being done,
as the New York figures, and pages of others that could be cited, prove.
The ultimate result is twofold:
1. Some of those who are doomed by heredity to a selective death, but
are kept alive through the first year, die in the second or third or
fourth year. They must die sooner or later; they have not inherited
sufficient resistance to survive more than a limited time. If they are
by a great effort carried through the first year, it is only to die in
the next. This is a statement which we have nowhere observed in the
propaganda of the infant mortality movement; and it is perhaps a
disconcerting one. It can only be proved by refined statistical methods,
but several independent determinations by the English biometricians
leave no doubt as to the fact. This work of Karl Pearson, E. C. Snow, and
Ethel M. Elderton, was cited in our chapter on natural selection; the
reader will recall how they showed that nature is weeding out the
weaklings, and in proportion to the stringency with which she weeds them
out at the start, there are fewer weaklings left to die in succeeding
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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