168 INFANT MORTALITY'S URGENT CALL FOR ACTION 



of every 100 babies born alive die within the first year. In some 

 countries the infant death rate is nearly if not quite twice as 

 high as that figure, but dealing only with the broadest averages, 

 the world's infant mortality now unquestionably amounts to 13 

 deaths for every 100 living births. As the tabulations for this 

 country appended to this paper make clear, the infant mortality 

 rate for the United States is certainly no better than that for 

 the rest of the world at large (See Chart 1), and surely there 

 could be no more convincing evidence of the ample justification 

 for the present world-wide movement along the lines on which 

 this Association was established than that one sombre fact, 

 namely, that no less than 13 of every 100 newly-tenanted baby- 

 carriages are vacated by death within the first twelve-month 

 under present conditions, year in and year out. From my point 

 of view, that fact is the basic fact of this crusade, is one which 

 every worker in the crusade should keep clearly in mind, and 

 one whose dire significance must be apparent to every thinking 

 man and woman. No knowledge of either statistics or pediatrics 

 is requisite for a full appreciation of it. 



As human nature is constituted, however, it is not what is 

 happening to the peoples of other lands, hundreds or thousands 

 of miles distant, which most strongly appeals to us, but, rather, 

 what is happening, or promises to happen, to us and to ours. 

 The people of the United States have repeatedly proven in sub- 

 stantial form their broad humanitarian sympathy with the suf- 

 ferers by the floods in China, the famine in India, and the 

 destruction of Messina and other far-away cities, but it is not 

 the infant mortality of the world at large, but that of Continental 

 United States which looms up large before American mothers 

 and fathers, and offers the problem which this Association is 

 designed to solve, in part at least. Just what is that particular 

 infant mortality, in so far as it can be approximately determined, 

 why is it as appallingly heavy as it is, and how may it be mate- 

 rially and permanently reduced? These are the questions which 

 now confront us, and which I shall briefly discuss in so far as 

 such weighty questions can be even superficially considered in 

 the few minutes which remain to me. 



What is, or has been, the infant mortality of the United 

 States as a whole? Nobody knows, and there is no means of 

 finding out. Even including the 18 States and 54 cities in other 

 States whose registration systems in 1909 were acceptable to 

 the Bureau of the Census, but 55.3 per cent, of the total esti- 

 mated population of Continental United States was included in 

 the Registration Area whose returns for last year are presented 

 in the Census Office's recent advance bulletin of Mortality Stat- 

 istics for 1909, and but a single one of all the Southern States, 



