Quality of Life and Mortality Among Children

Historical Perspectives

This birefs examines mortality among young children in the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It does so using several types and sources of information from the census unit England and Wales, and from Ireland. The sources of information used in this study include memoirs, diaries, poems, church records and numerical accounts. They offer descriptions of the quality of life and child mortality over the three centuries under study. Additional sources for the nineteenth century are two census-derived numerical indexes of the quality of life. They are the VICQUAL index for England and Wales, and the QUALEIRE index for Ireland. Statistical procedures have been applied to the numbers provided by the sources with the aim to identify effects of and associations between such variables as gender, age, and social background. The briefs examines the results to consider the impact of children’s deaths upon parents and families, and concludes that there are differences and continuities across the centuries.