Grammars of Death: 19th-Century Literal Causes of Death
Investigators: Susan Hautaniemi Leonard, Myron Gutmann
Historical mortality analyses and longitudinal epidemiology are confounded by changing conceptions of disease, diagnostic criteria, nomenclature, reporting requirements, reporting personnel/systems and standard nosologies over the course of studies. This is especially true of research concerning the early onset of the epidemiological transition and of contemporary developing countries during the early development of medical institutions and implementation of reporting systems. This proposal uses the case of the American epidemiological transition for a formal semantic analysis of literal causes of death in the Connecticut River Valley mill towns of Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts from 1850 to 1912. During the critical onset of the North American epidemiological transition, the sanitation movement and germ theory, and the first modern mortality reporting system in the United States, we document the social history of disease classification in reported literal causes of death, analyze the impact which historically changing causes of death may have on mortality transition research, estimate the specific extent and nature of social biases in the early evolution of cause of death recording, and explore the potential use of literal cause of death information for more accurate retrospective nosology in such circumstances. We address these complex issues through a formal semantic analysis of the grammars of death recorded for individuals (e.g., the literal causes of death, nomenclatures, the qualifying comments literal causes frequently contain, and the ordered structuring of nosological information) and compare the results of this analysis to historical and automated conventional nosologies.
Statement of work to be done at the University of Michigan: Much of the archival histories and portions of all analyses following data entry will be done at the University of Michigan.
| Funding: | Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development |
Funding Period: 01/30/2004 to 12/31/2007
PSC Research Theme:Health Conditions, Disability (Health, Disability, and Mortality)
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