Maternal and Infant Health: Understanding the Role of Institutions and Medical Innovations

Summary, in English

This chapter examines the development of maternal and infant mortality and its connection to changes in medical and healthcare treatment of mothers and infants in the city of Landskrona, Sweden, and its rural hinterland between 1905 and 2015. The authors show that maternal mortality, stillbirth rates, and infant mortality declined strongly in this period. In parallel, hospitals began to admit more women for childbirth and modernized their facilities, offering first more space and later neonatal intensive care. In addition, new medicines arrived, such as sulfa antibiotics against infant pneumonia and penicillin against most infections, and these proved efficient in surgical intervention around childbirth. Newly opened infant healthcare centers provided preventive care. The authors apply intervention analysis to the time series of mortality rates and find that most of these institutional reforms in medical and health care were related to lower stillbirth rates and higher survival of infants.

• Författare: Ingrid Kirsten van Dijk; Volha Lazuka; Luciana Quaranta
• Redaktör: Martin Dribe; Therese Nilsson; Anna Tegunimataka
• Avdelning/ar: Centrum för ekonomisk demografi; Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen; Ekonomisk demografi
• Publiceringsår: 2024-07-01
• Språk: Engelska
• Sidor: 243-280
• Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie: Urban Lives : An Industrial City and Its People During the Twentieth Century
• Länkar: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197761090.003.0008
• Dokumenttyp: Del av eller Kapitel i bok
• Förlag: Oxford University Press
• Ämne: Economic History
• Aktiv: Published
• Projekt: Landskrona Population Study; How welfare shapes our future: Policies targeted at young children and their -effects over the full life course – a case study of southern Sweden, 1920 to the present day
• ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt: ISBN: 9780197761090; ISBN: 9780197761113; ISBN: 9780197761120