Journal ArticleOf all the health revolutions that have taken place in the United States since 1850, the reduction of infant mortality is arguably the most dramatic and far-reaching. Because of the incompleteness and unreliability of surviving vital records,, we will probably never know precisely the rate of infant deaths a century ago. But an informed estimate would be that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all American infants born in the second half of the nineteenth century died before they could celebrate their first birthdays. It also seems probable that in some large cities and industrial towns, as well as in certain areas of the South, the rates were considerably higher, ranging upward to 30 percent
