Swansea and Glamorgan Herald, and South Wales Free Press. — 1866-05-05 (Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales)

UNPLEASANT PANIC.  The Medical Times and Gazette, while fully recogniz ng the value of Dr. Lankester's (the coroner for a portion of Middlesex) efforts to put down infanticide, protests against the matter bring made (as it bag too much been made) the subject of sensational leaders in the penny papers (says the Pall Mall (,'azette). Lord Stanley at Birmingham last ruturnti, gave a true estimate of the case when he spoke GE it as "one of those periodical jmnics to which all who have watched the course of public opinion in this country know that we are liable." But a panic of this kind is decidedly an unpleasant one. It is (as the Medical Times remarks) exceedingly unpleasant to find ourselves stiginati4ed in foreign newspapers, on Dr. Lankester's authority, an "a nation of infanticides ;" and this at a time when infant mortality is actually decreasing. Foreigners are ready enough to avail themselves of our insular habit of washing our dirty limm out of doors. The Papal 4.,verument even went so fax as to send over an emissary, the Abbe Cesare Contini, to collect statistics ; and his report, " based on Dr. Lankmiter's statements, gives the astounding (and, to the Oltramontane mind, no doubt highly gratifying) intelligence that 13 000 children are veiny muniered by their mothers in heretical England. Tba way in which M. Contini arrives at his monstrous total is a curious instance of how (se the  late Sir Robert Peel used to say) "an itynalbe proved by figures. Dr. Lankeeter holds from seventy to eighty inquests annually on children foiled exposed in the streets or elsewhere, and "gives it as his opinion that, from the advanced state of 'ecomposition in mono, of the bodies, at heist an equal number escape detection." Now the total number of inquests on children under seven held by English coroners, H. Contini found to be 6,5(41 in the year 1863; hence, on the Lankestrian hypothesis, as interpreted by the Italian abbe, there must be 6,506 cases which escape observation. Hence the 13,000 cases of infanticide. We have the Middlesex coroner to thank for this conclusion (we are quoting from the Pall Mall Ger:elle). He once rated the yearly victims of infanticide at 4,000, because in his district of a million people eighty inquests are held and eight cases undiscovered. And so he accepted this as a fair average, not only for the rest of London, but also for country parts, putting forward, moreover, the horrible hypothesis that one out of every thirty women whom you meet in the London streets has some time in her life "put away" her child. No doubt the bastardy laws are as bad as they can be, and the law which makes no distinction between murder and infanticide defeats itself. But still it is absurd to play the Alarmist in this manner. Dr. Farr, the great authority in statiaiics of this kind, says that infanticide is the cause of a very small fraction of children deaths. He tells us, too, that the mortality of young children is less in England than anywhere in Europe, except in Norway and Sweden. The undeniably exceesive rate of infant mortality in our great and little towns is due mainly to defective sanitary conditions. The landlords are the real murderers, slaying their tens of thousands while unhappy mothers slay their tens. The Medical Gazette appeals strongly to the orems to avoid sensational paragraphs on this subject: "Such crimes are undoubtedly repeated from imitation. Some phrase seizes the imagination, and the morbid disposition to repeat the act becomes sometimes irresistible."