The Decline in Mortality in Philadelphia from 1870 to 1930: the Role of Municipal Services
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The Decline in Mortality in Philadelphia from 1870 to 1930: The Role of Municipal Services HE CHRISTMAS SEASON of 1880 should have been a happy occasion for Charles and Caroline Kautz. Charles, a German T immigrant in his mid-forties, had operated a three-person bakery in the Moyamensing section of Philadelphia over a decade. Caroline, several years his junior and his wife of over fifteen years, had married him during her teens and soon assumed the responsibilities of parenthood. Though Pennsylvania born, Caroline also came from German stock and, with her husband, worshipped at a loc&l German Lutheran church. Caroline and Charles Kautz and their three sons and three daughters must have eagerly anticipated a joyous holiday cele- bration. But it was not their fate to enjoy this Christmas. In three and one-half weeks from late November to mid-December, smallpox took the lives of five of the six Kautz children. Six-year-old Clara died on November 20, followed by Albert (aged 2) two weeks later, then Edward (aged 4) on December 10, Charles (aged 8) on December 11, and Bertha (aged 10) on December 14. Only twelve-year-old Sophia survived. Burial in the Lutheran church cemetery followed each of the deaths in numbing succession. The tragedies that befell the Kautzes over a century ago illustrate in a concrete way part of the enormous gap separating the twentieth and the nineteenth centuries in America. Epidemic diseases, childhood death, and low adult life expectancies dominated life. Indeed, in the space of a decade, the Kautzes had witnessed smallpox epidemics in Philadelphia in 1871-72 and 1876 prior to the 1880-81 epidemic that devastated their family. The difference between the two centuries is often meas- *This research was done at the Philadelphia Social History Project, Theodore Hershberg, director, with support from the Center for Population Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (RO 1HD 12413) The PSHP gratefully acknowledges the funding it has received from the following federal agencies the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities We also wish to thank William Kreider, Jeffrey Seaman, Wayne Dunlap, and Mara Weitzman for computer support, and Alicia Gilham for graphics and typing 154 CONDRAN, WILLIAMS, & CHENEY April ured in terms of the rapid diffusion of communications, transportation, and machine technologies throughout our society. These forces, with- out doubt, make our lives much different. But they are no more im- portant to us than the lengthening of adult life and the elimination both of frequent early death and the constant anticipation of epidemic dis- ease. Recurrent smallpox epidemics, for example, which in Philadel- phia alone took 4464 lives in 1871 and 1872 and 1760 lives in 1880 and 1881, seem to be remnants of a distant past.1 Illnesses that rarely confront us today were frequently present only a century ago.2 Yet, as significant as the reduction in mortality has been, scholars still search for the reasons for the "mortality transition." Rising personal income, improved diet, better sanitation and personal hygiene, public health activities, advancing medical technology, are offered as com- peting, complementary, or interacting explanations.3 How any or all of these factors affect the propensity for a disease to be present in the en- vironment (exposure), or for a given population to avoid infection from a disease which is present (resistance), or for survival when individuals contract a disease (case survival) is also open to considerable debate. Although the origins and sources of the mortality transition are not fully understood, scholars have developed a commonly accepted por- trait of the change. It occurred during the nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries in most of Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In American cities, for example, mortality levels were high at the beginning of the nineteenth century and remained high for most of the century. Although mortality rates for some age groups 1 City of Philadelphia, Ftrst Annual Message of Edwin S. Stuart, Mayor of the City of Philadelphia with Annual Report of Abraham M. Settler and the Annual Report of the Board of Healthfor the year ending December 31, 1891 (Philadelphia, 1892), 508. 2 In a recent review of Robert Gottfried's book on the Black Death, William H. McNeill takes a much longer view of how "the disappearance of epidemic disease as a serious factor in human life" "separate(s) us from our ancestors." See "The Plague of Plagues," The New York Review of Books, XXX (July 21, 1983), 28-29. 3 See for example. Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (New York, 1976), 128-142, Thomas McKeown and R.G. Record, "Reasons for the Decline of Mortality in England and Wales during the Nineteenth Century," Population Studies, XVI, no 2 (July, 1962), 94-122, Samuel H. Preston and Etienne van de Walle, "Urban French Mortality in the Nineteenth Century," Population Studies, XXXII, no. 2 (July, 1978), 275-297, Gretchen A Condran and Rose A. Cheney, "Mortality Trends in Philadelphia Age- and Cause- Specific Death Rates 1870-1930," Demography, 9, no 1 (February, 1982), 97-123. 1984 MORTALITY IN PHILADELPHIA FROM 1870 TO 1930 155 and from some diseases (e.g., cholera and typhus) began declining earlier, a substantial and sustained decline in overall mortality levels did not begin until late in the nineteenth century.4 The changes in mortality rates in Philadelphia closely paralleled in both timing and magnitude those in other large cities of the United States and in urban areas in other industrializing nations.5 These trends can be traced fairly well after 1860 when the official registration of deaths with the issuance of a death certificate began. The deaths were aggregated and published in annual reports of the Board of Health and included in the mayor's yearly report. The published data provide a classification of the deaths by age and cause for the total population of the city. In addition, deaths by cause are published for the wards within the city. Using an average of these registration data for three years sur- rounding each federal decennial census date from 1870 to 1930 and base population figures from the decennial censuses, one can observe the pattern of mortality change.6 The description of changing mortality is expressed in two ways: as the probability that an individual in a par- ticular age group will die during a given five-year age period and as the expectation of life at selected ages. For each year, the expectation of life for a given age is the average number of years that would be lived by a hypothetical group of persons who reached that age in the year and who were subjected to that year's probabilities of dying at each subsequent age. The magnitude of the overall mortality decline in Philadelphia is apparent for all age groups (see Table 1). In 1870, for example, about 175 of every 1000 children born never survived to their first birthday. 4 Gretchen A. Condran and Eileen Crimmins, "Mortality Differentials between Rural and Urban Areas of States in the Northeastern United States, 1890-1900," Journal of Historical Geography, 6, no 2 (April, 1980), 179-202, Robert Higgs, "Mortality in Rural America, 1870-1920: Estimates and Conjectures," Explorations in Economic History, 10, no. 2 (1973), 177-193. 5 Gretchen A. Condran and Rose A. Cheney, 98-99. 6 The values of \(\Q in Table 1 were estimated using the values of 4q i fit to South Model Life Tables. For a full explanation of the estimating procedure see Gretchen A. Condran and Rose A. Cheney, 91-102. H6 U>M)i\\S WIHIWfN «, lH)\n »t 1 r =?• -!• V t r X> — r^ uC O\ tr t »«•< .J j •*$ 1 I* HI* CO <^ ™t -3 I fi 0\ /• r E \C 4 c 0 1 urn™ Hi" ffl- •rt V if t- **« t / *™ S a, ^ c 1 "^ r ri S ™. 0 £s ^^ ™« a* & X> -u (•"I *<• X -1 r 4 r- """? — c Ci £1 \5 3 j& 13 r* V DO C I - !> r VC £ O \0 r-- i» c J^I r^ —* &" =-* x> > -1. ? "^ .A, if* vi £ ? X C S •/ 0 r- —. r «-. >i _ r ^ C ™*. ^«- cr *=» +™* 0 =v4- ^ £, ?u S Q a- ^ r r> ^C J 1 •** 3^ ^f 0" 5- ^, as r "^ +** !t ^4. "™ t •JO fid / £ »»< C z # 1984 MORTALITY IN PHILADELPHIA FROM 1870 TO 1930 157 By 1930, fewer than 15 of every 1000 infants perished during the first year of life—a decline of about 175 percent in the probability of dying. Indeed, the late nineteenth century was still a difficult time for all children. Over a third of all infants born in 1870 died before they were ten. Sixty years later, about a tenth did not survive to that age, a sub- stantial improvement in life chances. Young adults also suffered from a harsh mortality regime in 1870—114 of every 1000 individuals reaching age 20 never lived to age 30—but by 1930 less than 20 of 1000 twenty-year olds died within ten years. The elderly also enjoyed a moderation in their mortality rates. In 1870, about 320 of every 1000 individuals reaching 60 years of age died within the next decade; by 1930, the corresponding figure was 183. The declines in infant mortality were particularly important for raising life expectancies between 1870 and 1930. At birth in 1870 an individual could expect on average to reach age 40; by 1930, an infant could expect to reach age 58—an increase in life expectancy of about 46 percent.