Overlaying

{{Short description|Accidental cause of death in small children}}

{{About|infant mortality|using the same region of memory for different computer code|Overlay (programming)}}

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

Athelstan Braxton Hicks, the Deputy Coroner for London and Surrey, noted in 1889 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.{{Cite journal|last=FORBES|first=THOMAS R.|date=April 1986|title=Deadly Parents: Child Homicide in Eighteenth– and Nineteenth–Century England|journal=Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences|volume=41|issue=2|pages=175–199|jstor=24633624|doi=10.1093/jhmas/41.2.175|pmid=3517141}} 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."{{cite news|url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71126209|title=How the London Poor Live.|date=23 November 1889|newspaper=Australian Town and Country Journal|accessdate=31 March 2018|issue=1036|location=New South Wales, Australia|volume=XXXIX|page=31|via=National Library of Australia}}

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).{{Citation|last=Johnson|first=Michael P.|date=November 1981|title=Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?|periodical=The Journal of Southern History|volume=47|issue=4|pages=493–520|doi=10.2307/2207400|publisher=The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 47, No. 4|jstor=2207400|pmid=11632401}}