Excerpt from Infant Mortality: Results of a Field Study in Manchester, N. H., Based on Births in One Year

Manchester, N. H., was the second city selected by the Children's Bureau for a field inquiry into infant mortality in its series of com munity studies upon this subject. The first study was made in Johnstown, Pa., a steel-mill city containing a large foreign population. A second report upon infant mortality, however, has been published by the bureau, namely, that for Montclair, N. J., a suburban resi dence community, where the investigation itself was conducted by the city authorities and the results presented by them to the Chil dren' s Bureau for analysis.

Manchester was chosen for several reasons: It had an unusually high infant mortality rate, it was within the registration area for births and deaths so that records for those were available, and it presented conditions which usually are associated with high infant mortality namely, a large foreign population and a considerable proportion of industrially employed women.

Because of incomplete-registration of births and deaths infant mor tality rates are not available for all cities in the United States, but only for those cities in which such registration is considered to be 90 per cent complete. Of such cities, according to the table, only two, Holyoke and Lowell, have higher infant mortality rates than Man chester, and the high rate in Holyoke is perhaps due in part to the presence there of a large infant asylum which receives infants born in other cities.

For the registration States,1 which in 1910 comprised per cent of the population and per. Cent of the land area of the United States, the infant mortality rate for 1910 was 124, as computed by the Bureau of the Census. In other words, for every eight births there Was one infant death.

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