ABSTRACT
In Britain, by the end of the nineteenth century it became evident that birth rates were falling and infant mortality was rising. There were very few, very affluent people living at the start of the twentieth century in Britain. They almost completely monopolised the telling of the past, certainly its quantitative recording, and only a tiny minority of them were interested in the poor or the idea of infant mortality as a social problem. High relative rates of infant mortality have also returned to London after a century of better than usual improvement. George Frederick McCleary argued that the provision of clean milk for infants through depots was needed to reduce infant mortality. A century ago the majority of people would have had first hand experience of infant mortality and of living in poverty. Infant mortality was first accurately measured globally in the 1970s.
