Mary answered a call during the night from a Mr. Stahl, informing the family that his four month old baby had died. Mary's father, in addition to other duties, was an undertaker, perhaps accounting for the call.
While steadily decreasing over the previous years, infant mortality at the time was high by today's standards. This from the May 14, 1918 Evening Public Ledger:
Philadelphia's infant mortality rate of 107 per 1,000 live births was lower than the national statistic of 157 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1917 (see the Bureau of the Census Mortality Statistics 1918). At the time the three most common causes of infant death were diarrhea and enteritis, premature birth and bronchopneumonia.
By 2016 infant mortality had fallen to 5.87 per 1,000 live births in the United States with the three most common causes of death being congenital malformations, low birth weight, and sudden infant death syndrome (see Mortality in the United States, 2016). According to the CIA's The World Fact Book, despite marked improvements over the last century, the United States currently ranks 56th lowest in infant mortality, worse than most developed countries.
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