Book: Grieving for our children

Woods stands on firm ground when surveying child mortality in the major Western countries (Eastern Europe and the rest of the world are omitted), buttressed by up-to-the-minute scholarship, fleet statistics, and the accepted view about a steep drop in mortality rates at the end of the 18th century. A more productive approach would perhaps have been to select two or three historical moments in the 18th and 19th centuries when child mortality rates sharply declined, and studied the responses to precipitous decline through "numbers, pictures and words".