INFANT MORTALITY.—FRANCE AND BAVARIA. [To THE EDITOR OF THE "
SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The writer of a paper on " Town Life in the South of France," which appears in the current number of Fraser's Maga- zine, states that the infant mortality in France is double that of England, Russia, and Bavaria. "In France 275 children in 1,000 die before completing their fourth year ; in Bavaria the num- ber of those that die is 134 in 1,000." Where the writer got these statistics about Bavaria I do not know, certainly not from the work of Staatsrath von Hermann, which is the great authority on the subject. If he had looked in that he would have found that while the number of infant deaths under one year is 185 in 1,000 in France, it is 294 in 1,000 in Bavaria. I take the figures as regards France from the Parlia- mentary return printed in the twenty-ninth volume of the "Accounts and Papers for 1862." Unfortunately the facts about Bavaria are not given as fully in any English official publication, and must be looked for in the Beitroge zur Statistik des Ktinigreichs Bayern, by F. B. W. von Hermann. But the fact of the vast pre- ponderance of infant deaths over those of the grown-up population in Bavaria has already been stated in my Social Life in Munich.—
Previous page
