NEONATAL MORTALITY IN NOR THAMPTONSHIRE: HIGHAM FERRERS 1880-1890

Abstract

Within much of the literature on infant mortality in the late I9th century, the neonate is usually discussed together with the older infant rather than as a separate entity, because of the lack of accurate age at death data. Information about the experience of the neonate has come from reconstitution studies or studies from a later period when age at death data was more accurate. The smallpox vaccination birth registers and infant death registers provide this information and have been used in this paper to explore the neonatal experience of a group of infants born during the I880s in Northamptonshire. The rate of neonatal death was found to be high, especially in Rushden, a shoemanufacturing centre. This rate could be attributed to the impact of industrialization and rapid population growth at the time, but the rate for the other towns in the subdistrict, which did not have similar experiences, was also high. This suggests that factors other than urbanization may have been influential in the death of the infant during the first month of life in the Higham Ferrers Sub-District. For the most part the findings support rather than contradict previous work, indicating that the previously identified influencing factors on neonatal death were also to be found in the Higham Ferrers Sub-District.