Diet & Infant Mortality 
One of the major causes of infant mortality was the widespread practice of giving children
narcotics, especially opium, to quieten them. At 1 penny an ounce, laudanum was cheap
enough - about the price of a pint of beer - and its sale was totally unregulated until
late in the century. The use of opium was widespread both in town and country. In
Manchester, according to one account, five out of six working-class families used it
habitually. One Manchester druggist admitted selling a half gallon of Godfrey's Cordial
(the most popular mixture, it contained opium, treacle, water, and spices) and between
five and six gallons of what was euphemistically called "quietness" every week. At
mid-century there were at least ten proprietary brands, with Godfrey's Cordial, Steedman's
Powder, and the grandly named Atkinson's Royal Infants Preservative among the most
popular. In East Anglia opium in pills and penny sticks was widely sold and opium-taking
was described as a way of life there. Throughout the Fens it was used in "poppy tea," and
doctors there reported how the infants were wasted from it - "shrank up into little old
men," "wizened like little monkeys" is the way they were described.

It seems, however, that infants died more from starvation than directly through Opium
intake. A Doctor noted that children "kept in a state of continued narcotism will be
thereby disinclined for food, and be but imperfectly nourished." The infants died from
severe malnutrition, but the coroner was likely to record the death as "debility from
birth," or "lack of breast milk," or simply "starvation."

Another cause of infant mortality and hazardous childbirth was low nutritional standards.
Many women were seriously anaemic and had rickets, which could cause contracted pelvises,
making childbirth difficult. As late as the Edwardian period working-class women were
gravely underweight and small in stature. In Manchester, just before the First World War,
thirteen-year-old girls from working-class families were three inches shorter and eight
pounds lighter than girls of a "good class"; they stood seven inches shorter and weighed
twenty-three pounds less than girls of a similar age living in the 1950s.

During the nineteenth century, much of the food consumed by the working-class family was
contaminated by foreign substances and chemicals, or befouled by animal and human
excrement. Mineral poisons were often introduced into food and water from bottle
stoppers, water pipes, wall paints, or equipment used to process food and beverages.

In 1872, for example, because of the Englishman's dislike for brown bread, bakers
regularly whitened their flour with alum, which, although not poisonous, inhibited the
digestion and lowered the nutritional value of other foods.

If you think our foods today contain too many additives, read this:

"The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent
chemist: strychnine, cocculus inculus (both are hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and
beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in
mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate,
and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, and
Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were
extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in
chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester
cheese its 'healthy' red hue, flour and arrowroot a rich thickness to cream, and tea
leaves were 'dried, dyed, and recycled again'."

As late as 1877 a quarter of the milk contained excessive water, or chalk, and ten per
cent of all the butter, over eight per cent of the bread, and 50 per cent of the gin had
copper in them to heighten the color. Even luxury items for the relatively well off were
hardly any better. Here are the tasty ingredients in a samples of ice cream: cocci,
bacilli, torulae, cotton fiber, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hair, and
cat and dog hair. Such contaminated ice cream caused diphtheria, scarlet fever,
diarrhoea, and enteric fever.

And if you're still worried about "mad cow disease", in 1862 it was estimated that
one-fifth of butcher's meat in England and Wales came from animals which were
"considerably diseased" or had died of pleuro-pneumonia, and anthacid or anthracoid
diseases.

Food was scarce, primitive and unhealthy. Few of the poor had ovens and had to rely
either on open-fire pan cooking, buy their hot food out, or make do with cold meals. Even
at the turn of the century social workers entering the homes of the poor to teach wives
how to cook were aghast to discover that the family possessed only one pot, and that
before their lesson in economy stews and soups could begin, the pot would have to be
cleaned of the baby's bath water, or worse. As late as 1904 an official committee of
inquiry was distressed to learn how few of the poor had sufficient utensils and appliances
to cook at home. Primitive or non-existent cooking facilities, lack of cheap fuel,
poverty, ignorance, and adulterated foods combined to produce a nation, by today's
standards, of pygmies, who were under-nourished, anaemic, feeble and literally rickety.

The urban poor ate tripe, slink (prematurely born calves), or broxy (diseased sheep).
Some working-class families shopped for "tainted" pieces of meat and odds and ends of
meat, the by-products of the butchering business. Sheep's heads at 3d each and American
bacon at between 4d and 6d a pound (half the price of the native product) were too
expensive for the irregularly-employed casual labourer to have frequently. In
Macclesfield 23 per cent of the silk workers had never tasted meat. Stocking weavers,
shoemakers, needle women and silk weavers ate less than one pound of meat a week and less
than eight ounces of fats.

It wasn't until the last quarter of the century that the working man's diet improved
significantly. Between 1877 and 1889 the cost of the average national weekly food basket
of butter, bread, tea, milk and meat fell by some 30 per cent, and it was in this period
that the first really appreciable nutritional improvement (aided by a greater variety of
foods and new methods of retailing), occurred. The cheaper food products that came in
with the refrigerator, and then freezer-ships, the development of inexpensive margarine,
the fall in price of most consumer items, all served to increase both the variety and
quantity of the workmen's diet in this period.