Monthly mortality returns, two obstetric clinics of a Vienna hospital, 1841–1849
- Origin
- Hospital returns, reproduced in the scholarly literature
- Dated
- 1841–1849
- Extent
- 22 pages
- Status
- accepted
- Redactions
- None. The bracketed note is ours and is marked as ours.
Chain of custody
Read in facsimile. Every figure in our story is taken from these returns rather than from a later account of them, because effect sizes shrink on the way through a summary and this desk has a standing rule about it. Where our figure differs in the second decimal place from a number a reader may have seen elsewhere, the returns are why, and we have printed the raw counts alongside the percentages so the arithmetic can be checked.
Held by: They Buried, document room
Excerpt
1846 — first clinic: 4,010 delivered, 459 died.
second clinic: 3,754 delivered, 105 died.
1847 — chlorinated lime instituted at the first clinic in May.
first clinic: 3,490 delivered, about 176 died.
second clinic: about 32 died.
[The two clinics admitted on alternating days. The building, the beds and the
population were the same. The staff were not.]
Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.
Editor's note
Filed as the cleanest natural experiment in the vault. Two wards, one building, alternating admission, one difference — and a number that halves and halves again within a year of a basin being put by a door. The document is not in dispute and never was; what took fourteen years was somebody writing it down.
Cited in
- He Had The Numbers In 1847. He Published In 1861.Suppressed Science · Aug 10