On an Investigation into the Mortality of the Married Females of the Peerage

Abstract

In July 1880 there appeared in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries certain “Remarks as to the Influence of Marriage on the Death-Kates of Males and Females, abridged from Dr. James Stark's Letters to the Kegistrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Scotland” (J.I.A. xxii. 233). In these letters Dr. Stark compares the mortality of the married and unmarried females at different ages in Scotland in the years 1861 and 1862; and calls attention to the fact, that the excessive mortality of the former, as compared with that of the latter class of lives, appears to be confined to the ages under thirty years. He offers, as an explanation of this, the great danger—well known, as he says, to every medical practitioner—which attends the delivery of the first child; and then proceeds to demonstrate its effect by means of two tables, showing (1) “the number and ages of mothers and the number of children which they had on the birth of their last child,” and (2) the “proportion of mothers bearing their first child to every 100 mothers.” The figures given in the former table show that nearly as many women above thirty years as under that age bear children; and yet the marked difference between the mortalityof the married and unmarried is only apparent below that age. From inspection of the second table, which shows the number of mothers bearing their first child to be, after age thirty, very small as compared with those under that age, he concludes that not only is the view that the risk to the mother is far greater at her first confinement, than at any subsequent delivery, rendered almost a certainty, but that the increased mortality of the married females is almost solely due to this cause.