(4 of 6)
Record Met Sirs: TIME, MAY 25, P. 38 SAYS: "IN LYING-IN-HOSPITAL . . . 2,881 BABIES WERE BORN LAST YEAR. . . . DEATH CAME TO ONLY 15 MOTHERS AT LYING-IN. NO OTHER BUSY MATERNITY HOSPITAL ON EARTH CAN MEET THAT RECORD FOR LOW MORTALITY." IN 1935 MARGARET HAGUE MATERNITY HOSPITAL, JERSEY CITY, DELIVERED 5,170 LIVING BABIES, LOST ONLY 15 MOTHERS FROM ALL CAUSES. MORTALITY RATES, CHICAGO HALF ONE PERCENT, JERSEY CITY SLIGHTLY OVER QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT.
S. A. COSGROVE Medical Director Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital Jersey City, N. J.
Sirs: TIME, May 25, exaggerates slightly in stating that no other busy maternity hospital on earth can meet the record of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital for low mortality in 1935.
At Chicago Lying-in in 1935, 2,881 births, 15 maternal deaths, mortality rate 5.2 per 1,000 births. At Boston Lying-in Hospital in 1934 and 1935. 4,961 live births, 18 maternal deaths, mortality rate 3.6 per 1,000 live births. TIME'S report of Chicago Lying-in Hospital's baby mortality is not complete enough to permit comparison with that of the Boston Lying-in Hospital.
Maternal mortality rates in hospitals vary considerably according to the proportion of neglected, mismanaged, gravely sick, emergency cases admitted: therefore, cannot be justly compared without analysis. Readers of TIME may get a better idea of the real risk of child-birth under the care of a modern maternity hospital from the following figures.
In two years, 1934 and 1935, Boston Lying-in Hospital delivered 6,928 women, for whose care throughout pregnancy and confinement it alone was responsible. About 2,000 of these were delivered in their homes by internes or externes of the hospital. The others were delivered in the hospital because they preferred it or because the staff thought it advisable. Eight of these women died, a mortality rate of 1.15 per 1,000 women delivered.
At the Boston Lying-in Hospital, it may be added, analgesic drugs are routinely and successfully used to alleviate the pain of childbirth, rithout harmful effects on mothers or babies. JUDSON A. SMITH, M. D.
Obstetrician to Out-Patients, Boston Lying-in Hospital Instructor in Obstetrics, Harvard Medical School Boston, Mass.
Pleasure from Orpheus Sirs: Though in an unhappy mood of revolt against the press, I think I know a good job of disapprobation when I see one. TIME is to be complimented upon its brisk descriptive damning of Balanchine's Orpheus and Eurydicc [TIME, June 1. Critics of the daily papers indulged in obscure epithets and bigotted defence of what they term tradition, in the ferocious die-hard manner. TIME'S policy, I believe, is to report the response of the public to such a performance in the spirit in which it reports the performance, as news: not to give individual opinion of its writers. In this case it failed to note the existence of two camps, two mutually exclusive views of the future of opera in New York. I submit what follows as information rather than resentful protest.