96 BIRTH REGISTRATION 



under one year of age (exclusive of stillbirths) to 1,000 chil- 

 dren born alive. It is not the ratio of deaths of infants under 

 one year of age to the enumerated or estimated population of 

 that age. This ratio is sometimes employed, but Is very mislead- 

 ing when mistaken for the accepted ratio of infantile mortality 

 based upon the comparison of deaths and births. We can not, 

 therefore compute the true amount of infantile mortality from the 

 registration of deaths alone, and this is the reason why we can not 

 for the United States as a whole, for the registration area, 

 for any State, or for even a single large city in the entire United 

 States, present reliable statistics of infantile mortality that may 

 be safely compared with those of other civilized countries. 



Talk about the registration of births in the United States! 

 Why, for not much more than one-half (55.3 per cent.) of the 

 total population of the United States is there even fairly ac- 

 curate registration of deaths alone. Many States practically 

 the entire South make no more records of the deaths of their 

 citizens than if they were cattle; not even as much, for blooded 

 cattle have their vital events recorded, while human beings are 

 thrown into their graves without a trace of legal registration. 

 And even the States that have fairly good registration of deaths, 

 and that have had such registration for many years, grossly 

 neglect the equally important, or even more important, registra- 

 tion of births. Here is a specific case mentioned by Dr. John 

 N. Hurty, Secretary of the State Board of Health of Indiana, 

 in his Chairman's address, on "The Book-keeping of Human- 

 ity," at the last meeting of the Section on Preventive Medicine 

 of the American Medical Association: 



Farmer Hadley, of Indiana, dying, left his valuable farm 

 in trust to his unthrifty son, to go to his granddaughter on her 

 twenty-first birthday. The girl had been told the date of her 

 birth and always celebrated as her birthday the annual recur- 

 rence of the same. However, when she believed she was 21, 

 then claimed her inheritance, her father denied her age, saying 

 she was only 19. The family Bible was appealed to [we have 

 few family Bibles nowadays], but the leaf with the record was 

 gone. No birth record had been rendered, and the attending 

 physician was dead. The court was in a quandary. A Solomon 

 was needed for judgment. At last a neighbor remembered that 

 a valuable cow belonging to the grandfather had given birth to 

 a calf on the day the girl was born, and he could swear to it. 

 Perhaps the grandfather had recorded the date? of the birth of 

 the calf. His farm books showed this to be the case. The date 

 of birth of the human being was established. 



Pretty cheap humanity, not willing to spend about thirty 



