For 27 years annual figures have been kept of all infants weighing 2500 g or less born in the maternity department of the Northern General Hospital, Sheffield. The initial neonatal mortality rate (death within the first four weeks after birth) was then around 30% and is now 10%. This reduction is partly due to a decreased mortality rate among the individual weight groups but also to an increasi...

to prematurity or its causes in obstetric or paediatric literature prior to this century, except in Paris where the first modern infant incubator was installed by Tarnier in 1880 at the Maternity Hospital. It was big enough to hold several children and designed from a chicken incubator by the Director of the Zoo. Prematurity is now one of the outstanding paediatric problems and it is an importa...