Overlaying

Overlaying or overlying is the act of accidentally smothering a child to death by rolling over them in sleep.

This article is about infant mortality. For using the same region of memory for different computer code, see Overlay (programming).

Alleged instances of overlaying were perceived to be one common way of covering up infanticide in Victorian England. Many wet nurses were accused of this, and in many counties the wet nurse would have to provide a crib out of her own money to ensure that she would not sleep with the child.

The London coroner Athelstan Braxton Hicks noted that "during the last ten months no less than 500 cases had occurred in which children had been suffocated while in bed with their parents, in London alone." He estimated that a third of the allegedly accidental deaths of children were due to suffocations.[1] Overcrowded conditions often led to overlaying and in another case he noted "it was no use reading the father a lesson on sleeping in a crowded room, for he was hard-up and could not pay for large apartments. The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death," and expressed its opinion that the father had done the best he could in the circumstances." [2]

In researching smothering deaths by black slaves in the American South, which occurred nine times more frequently than in white families, Michael P. Johnson suggests that sudden infant death syndrome was in fact to blame (which, if it happened in white families, would be heavily underreported because of the social stigma attached).[3]

See also

References
  1. FORBES, THOMAS R. (April 1986). "Deadly Parents: Child Homicide in Eighteenth– and Nineteenth–Century England". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 41 (2): 175–199. doi:10.1093/jhmas/41.2.175. JSTOR 24633624. PMID 3517141.
  2. "How the London Poor Live". Australian Town and Country Journal. XXXIX (1036). New South Wales, Australia. 23 November 1889. p. 31. Retrieved 31 March 2018 – via National Library of Australia.
  3. Johnson, Michael P. (November 1981), "Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?", The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 47, No. 4, 47 (4), pp. 493–520, doi:10.2307/2207400, JSTOR 2207400, PMID 11632401
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