Introductory notes on lying-in institutions : $b Together with a proposal for organising an institution for training midwives and midwifery nursesNightingale, Florence
Science
Introductory notes on lying-in institutions : $b Together with a proposal for organising an institution for training midwives and midwifery nurses
Nightingale, Florence
Women's hospitals
Lamentable as are these death-rates in many British institutions, they
are small in comparison with those which have ruled in many foreign
hospitals.
Table X. contains an abstract from Dr. Le Fort’s work of the statistics
of 58 lying-in institutions in nearly every country of Europe, and
extending in many cases over a considerable number of years. There is
only one hospital (at Bourg) in which there was no death in 4 years, out
of 461 deliveries.
There is one hospital (at Troyes), with a death-rate of 4 per 1,000 on
460 deliveries in 4 years.
There are two instances of death-rates of 7 per 1,000. There is one of
9, and there are two of 10 per 1,000.
In every other case the death-rates have exceeded these amounts, rising
higher and higher in different institutions, until they culminate in a
death-rate of no less than 140 per 1,000, at Strasburg, on a four years’
average among 556 deliveries. Le Fort’s data show a striking variation
in the death-rates of the same hospitals in different years, as will
presently be seen to be the case in hospitals in this country. There are
instances in these foreign hospitals of the death-rates varying from 4
to 7–fold in different groups of years in the same hospital.
Le Fort’s data show that in lying-in hospitals in various countries and
climates, scattered over nearly the whole of Europe, out of 888,312
deliveries there were no fewer than 30,394 deaths, giving an average
death-rate of 34 per 1,000, a rate exceeding the high mortality which
led to the discontinuance of our school for training midwifery nurses in
King’s College Hospital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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