Regardless of culture, location or time, death and birth have always been two concepts that humans have always been keen to discuss. On one hand, we have the spiritual and esoteric comprehension of these features, and on the other hand, the more material qualities as presented by trends, statistics and records. Just as much as the concept of birth and death can tell us a great deal of information in the social properties of a given group, the actual recorded births and deaths can explain a great deal in the area of population dynamics. A particularly descriptive category of mortality is those in maternal/infant populations, life expectancy and a number of specific causes of death. These factors are very revealing in regards to infrastructure,
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This practice commonly yielded lower rates of maternal mortality for hospitals and was employed despite the differing method of calculation from other statistic recording bodies. Another case of differing methods of measurement was in the wake of the establishment of a prenatal clinic at Winnipeg’s General Hospital in 1921, dropping from a previously common (for a hospital) rate of 10.09 per 1000 maternal mortalities during the period of 1917-20, to 3.17 thereafter. Well under the national average, and matching closer with the findings of the 1923 CBDS report of Winnipeg’s MMR (Figure. 13.). However, this wasn’t any medical miracle. Rather, they simply excluded from their metric those who gave birth who either: entered the hospital with complications, or were ‘already in grave distress’ (Mitchinson, 2000). To best sum up this blemish on Canadian medical history would be a quote from an unnamed physician: ‘Some physicians prefer to report … almost any other cause [of mortality] rather than puerperal sepsis or one of the other causes of maternal mortality’ (Mitchinson, 2000), well encapsulating what the high Maternal Mortality Rates found in hospitals represented. An embarrassment to both trail-blazing individual practitioners and the advancing medical community as a whole, who in their forward thinking seemed to be causing as much harm as
This practice commonly yielded lower rates of maternal mortality for hospitals and was employed despite the differing method of calculation from other statistic recording bodies. Another case of differing methods of measurement was in the wake of the establishment of a prenatal clinic at Winnipeg’s General Hospital in 1921, dropping from a previously common (for a hospital) rate of 10.09 per 1000 maternal mortalities during the period of 1917-20, to 3.17 thereafter. Well under the national average, and matching closer with the findings of the 1923 CBDS report of Winnipeg’s MMR (Figure. 13.). However, this wasn’t any medical miracle. Rather, they simply excluded from their metric those who gave birth who either: entered the hospital with complications, or were ‘already in grave distress’ (Mitchinson, 2000). To best sum up this blemish on Canadian medical history would be a quote from an unnamed physician: ‘Some physicians prefer to report … almost any other cause [of mortality] rather than puerperal sepsis or one of the other causes of maternal mortality’ (Mitchinson, 2000), well encapsulating what the high Maternal Mortality Rates found in hospitals represented. An embarrassment to both trail-blazing individual practitioners and the advancing medical community as a whole, who in their forward thinking seemed to be causing as much harm as