Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 202-205. (Budapest, 2008)
TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - VARGA, Gabriella: A comparative study of the social-political determinants of infant and child mortality in Sweden and Hungary 1850-1945. - Összehasonlító tanulmány a svéd és a magyar csecsemőhalandóság szociálpolitikai tényezőiről 1850 és 1945 között
importance of household environments can be underlined with a study made by Burström and Bernhard (2001) who found a decrease in mortality in gastro-intestinal diseases in Stockholm at the turn of the 20 th century after the improvements made in the water and sanitation system. Hungarian situation of this time however shows lack of water closets - only 2% of the households had one {Kapronczay, 2001). However the decline in IMR happened before the widespread of water closets. Impact of social group on child mortality in Stockholm was studied by Burström and Bernhardt (2001). They found that the relative risk (RR) of mortality regarding social class increased in Stockholm during the period of 1885-1910. Bakács (1948) found that mortality among infants born to unmarried mothers was twice of infants born with both parents in Budapest in early decades of the 19 th century. Objectives The aim of this work is to analyse briefly some of the possible influential factors which caused the IMR in Sweden and in Hungary as well as in Stockholm and Budapest to be so different during the studied period. This study can be seen as a hypothesis generating for a next step in research. Method and material The material of this study comes from multiple sources. I used PubMed, www.medorg.scb.se, searched in the databases of the Karolinska Institute, the University of Stockholm and the Hungarian Semmelweis Library for the History of Medicine. The statistical data comes from the reviewed articles as well as from the databases of the Swedish Statistical Central Bureau (SCB) and the Hungarian Statistical Central Bureau (KSH). Searched key words were: infant mortality, child mortality, Sweden, and Hungary, social determinants and others. Using PubMed we found more than 400 hits about infant mortality in Sweden and more than 150 about Hungary. We relied mostly on the old studies in the Hungarian case from the Semmelweis Library for the History of Medicine. Sweden on the other hand had more up-todate studies about this period. Different studies use different age classifications in their mortality data. There are classifications both "under 1 year", "under 3", "under 5" and "under 7" in Hungarian papers that makes them hard to compare. We map the determinants using and complete the analytical framework of Mosley and Chen (1984). We will first compare the changes of the IMR in Sweden and Hungary, than we will look at the two capitals Stockholm and Budapest and continue with the list of the compared determinants. We focus on the following determinants: nursing, midwives, housing, general education, economy and a brief overlook of the political system's influential factor. Only aggregated data are analysed due to the limits of the thesis.
