This proposal seeks funding to support the publication of a conference volume devoted to the history of the registration of mortality by cause and historical prespectives on changing classfications of causes of death. The applicant is co-director of Indiana University's Center for the History of Medicine and an historian of medicine whose work has focused on the very earliest of European civic mortality registers. Together with co- principal investigator George C. Alter, an historical demographer and director of Indiana University's Population Institute for Research and Training, the applicant will edit and amplify a volume reflecting the proceedings of a November, 1993, conference held in Bloomington, Indiana. The conference brings demographers and epidemiologists together with historians of medicine to discuss the problems and opportunities in historical studies of causes of death. The study of long-term trends in mortality is complicated considerably by changing classification systems of cause of death. The changing role of chronic diseases in mortality, for example, is largely hidden by the varying means that physicians, public health authorities, and even lay assessors use to record illnesses and deaths that did not amplify public worries about acute, infectious diseases. The use of these data requires more than an understanding of changes in medical knowledge, however. The conference will examine the institutional context in which registration of deaths was developed, change in prevailing medical theories over time, physician and lay interest in assigning cause of death, as well as the needs for collaboration between historians of medicine and historical demographers. Historical data and considerations here directly impinge upon current policy issues. This proposal seeks the support necessary to produce a useful, focused volume for the larger interdisciplinary audience who appeal to assumptions and conclusions about the course of past morbidity and mortality in the devloped world.
| Alter, G C; Carmichael, A G (1999) Classifying the dead: toward a history of the registration of causes of death. J Hist Med Allied Sci 54:114-32 |
