Sweet child of mine : child mortality in Veneto at the dawn of the demographic transition

This book focuses on child mortality, and mainly on infant and neonatal mortality, during the 19th centuries in Veneto, northeastern Italy. In this region the levels of infant mortality during the period 1750-1850 are among the highest ever recorded for a large area over a significant amount of time. This peculiar characteristic is mainly due to the exceptionally high neonatal winter mortality. Following this period, however, infant mortality steadily began to decline. The Department of Statistics of the University of Padova has developed the project CHILD (Collecting Hasbugical Information on Life and Death), recording nominative data on births and deaths in the age 0-4 years in 46 parishes of the Central Veneto (provinces of Venice, Padova, Treviso, Vicenza and Verona). CHILD is based on the Habsburg registers, compiled by the priests between 1816 and 1870. The availability of data on 152,000 births and 62,000 deaths, linked using nominative keys, allowed to carry out a careful study on mortality in the first five years of life, pushing the differential analysis to a degree of consistency not feasible for small communities. One of the main results of the book is that during the first two observed decades (1816-35), neonatal mortality remains high, and differences in mortality according to socioeconomic status are modest and not systematic. In the 1840s, however, survival in the first year of life (but not for ages 1-4) began to increase. Mortality first started to decline among the richest families and in cities, later spreading among the peasants of rural villages.