Городская смертность в Норвегии во второй половине XIX в. (по материалам приходских книг Тронхейма)

This article provides detailed analysis of mortality in Trondheim, the third largest city in Norway in the second half of the nineteenth century. Referring to individual-level causes of death available in burial registers from Trondheim, this study provides an in-depth analysis of reporting practices and trends in cause of death registration and changes in a city that witnessed increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. Having studied the history of causes of death registration in Norway, the authors analyse the accuracy of recording practices performed by priests and age-specific profiles of individual death causes. The coding and classification system employed by the authors includes 141 categories following the etiology or mode of infection and transmission. To facilitate the analysis, all the entries found in records, both the ones that indicate the causes of death of the inhabitants of Trondheim and fail to do so, are divided into six major groups, i.e. infectious diseases; non-infectious diseases; external causes; older rationals; ill-defined, and not reported (blank). Treated critically, the data generates interesting  insights into the epidemiological history of a period where cause of death statistics from doctors was still scarce in most of the country. The analysis demonstrates that in the second half of the nineteenth century, airborne infectious diseases dominated the disease environment in Trondheim. Airborne diseases were particularly common in children aged one to four, accounting for 60 percent of the total of deaths among children of the age group. As for foodborne infectious diseases, such as diarrhoea and dysentery, the study indicates that the water pipes which started being used as early as the 1850s and from 1880 also appeared inside houses, had a certain effect, in addition to the top priority of personal hygiene addressed by the city’s Health Commission. Moreover, the cause of death classification related to ‘older rationales’ had a clear clustering both among the elderly and children.