Professor Jay Winter
speaker
38 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Sep 2010
Professor Jay Winter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The age of 30 and 31 and so on.
Using those, I was able to estimate the number of people who would have died had there been no war.
And the results produced the statistics of casualties for Britain that resulted in my estimation of three-quarters of a million deaths.
British men who died.
But it also produced the puzzling paradox that after the age of 40, the number of people who would have died had there been no war was higher than the number of people who actually died.
And that meant there was an improvement in civilian health.
By and large, the birth rate plummeted.
But one of the puzzling features of the First World War was the chances of survival of infants improved dramatically.
And one way to understand that is that the practice of midwifery took over from doctors who frequently used forceps.
The fact that doctors did not organize deliveries probably saved the lives of infants who otherwise would have been damaged.
I think roughly 100,000 children.
are alive because of the change in obstetric practices.
My guess is that there would have been one million more babies born had the First World War not taken place.
But the important thing to recognize is that the experience of Britain was different from the experience of most countries in the war where civilians suffered as much as soldiers did.
I would say that the 20 million people who died from the Spanish flu, more than twice those who were killed or died in active service, were secondary victims of the First World War.
That is to say, had the First World War not happened, mutant viruses would have occurred.
They've occurred long after.
but they wouldn't have had that astonishing power that they did in the two waves of 1918 and 1919 that hit so many so hard and provided a devastating second wave of bereavement to a world already in mourning.
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