The Causes of Death and the Incidence of Disease in Children

Abstract

This paper represents a review of the records of 1,000 consecutive necropsies on children. The causes of death (as determined at these postmortem examinations) and all of the diseases found have been tabulated and are the basis of this report.No like study has been found in a careful search of the medical literature for the past twenty years. The absence of any similar report concerning children has been an added incentive to such a mass presentation.The statistics presented in this paper may be of value as they are taken from a comparatively large series and cover a period of years. This makes it possible to avoid, to some extent, the inaccuracies and apparent discrepancies that are present in smaller numbers of consecutive necropsies. For example, there were five tumors of the brain in one year and only one in the other seven and one half years covered by this report; in one period of eleven months there were twenty anomalies of the urinary tract,1 and only thirteen in the remaining years ; there was only one example of diffuse actinomycosis in the thousand necropsies, and that was in the last year of the period covered, and now within a year of that instance there have been two more cases ; there were three instances of horseshoe-shaped kidneys in one period of eight¬ een months and only one instance in the other seven years. These are only a few examples of a condition that is evident to a greater of lesser degree throughout the series and in every disease, and is a well known clinical experience.It should be emphasized that the figures given in this paper represent incidence in children that have died. These figures are not, therefore, comparable with figures of the incidence of diseases in general.