LHnFANT MORTALITY IN RUSSIA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 681, 29 July 1870, Page 3

LHnFANT MORTALITY IN RUSSIA.

+ A frightful account of infant mortality in Russia is given by Mr Michel], in his official report. Of the whole number of births in the month of October in the province of Novgorod, 36 per cent do not.suryive, and he tells us the same ia true of the greater part of Northern, Central, and Eastern Russia. The proportion of deaths rises during the winter till, in April, 61 per cent pass away, and even this is surpassed in July and August, when 75 per cent of the new-born die. In explanation of the terrible mortality in these two latter months, Mr Michell observes that they are the months of harvest, when the peasant mothers are obliged to go out to work in the fields and leave their infants in the care of young children or women too old for out-door work^The poultice of ryebread, oatmeal, curds) Sec, placed over their children's mouths, when their mothers leave to work in • the harvest field, frequently chokes them ; frequently also domestic animals come and deprive the infant of its food. Its cries for natural sustenance produce internal distensions which, in the absence of "any proper system "of bandaging new-born children, result in hernia and other disorders with which the people of Russia are much afflicted." Mr Michell goes on to assign other reasons for the frightfully high rate of infant mortality, which makes us wonder, not that so many children die, but that any children or any mothers survive: — "Their (the peasant women's) confinement frequently takes place in a hut devoted to the purposes of a steam-bath, or, if in summer, in a barn, outhouse, or Btable. In three days at the utmost she leaves the place, and resumes her domestic duties, even her hard field work. Cases occur in which the mother of only one day joins the mowers or the reapers. The custom of the country compels her to take a steam-bath on the third day , which still further exhausts her, and renders less possible the natural nutrition of the child. The latter passes through its first great crisis on the third or fourth day of its existence, when the doctrines of the Russian Church demand complete immersion at baptism in water, of which it is sin to remove the chill. Within a week after birth a large proportion of infants, therefore, succumb to the unfavourable influences of the world into which they have been ushered." The mother generally weans her child on one of two days fixed by superstition — one in July, that is, when cattle disease is most prevalent ; the other in January, when milk is most scarce. If the child passes this ordeal, another superstitious belief hastens it to the grave— it is generally considered wrong to give it any clothes but a shirt before seven years of age.