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Health and Disease
Infant Mortality
Between 1860 and 1865, the total infant population
of New York City (classified as being under the age of five) numbered
118,477. During that time period the average annual deaths of
infants was 12,188, or 102.9 per thousand, as compared with a
total mortality rate of 29.7 per thousand for the same period.
Of infant deaths, 7,473, or roughly 32 percent of the average
annual mortality rate for the total population during those years,
were children less than a year old.1
In comparing Irish-born mortality to German-born mortality between
1860 and 1865, Duffy finds a yearly average of 4,739 deaths among
the Irish-born population, accounting for 20 percent of all deaths.
Germans fared better, accounting for an annual mortality count
of 1,604, or seven percent of the yearly death rate. Since infants
accounted for such a high percentage of deaths and would be, by
default considered native-born, these numbers do not tell the
whole story. In comparing deaths of children under 20 in the year
1865, native-born children account for 1,646 deaths while the
children of foreign-born account for the nearly ten times that
number - 13,158.2
Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, infant
mortality declined significantly. In 1840, approximately 190 of
every 1,000 infants born in New York City never reached their
first birthdays; in 1870 that figure had passed 200. By 1930,
however, fewer than 70 in 1,000 infants born in New York City
died in the first year of life.3
1 John Duffy, A History of Public Health in
New York City (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1968); Samuel H.
Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late
Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
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