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Fall 2004

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Last Words
Professor Doug Anderton enlightens medical history through the language of death

–Christopher O'Carroll




	By studying death records of the 1800’s, sociology professor Doug Anderton hopes to provide a clearer picture of medical practices of that time.

FOR SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR DOUGLAS ANDERTON, death certificates make lively reading.

As lead researcher on Grammars of Death, a project funded by a $900,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health ( http://www.nih.gov/ ) , Anderton is delving into Holyoke and Northampton city archives, poring over 50,000 death records dating back to the mid-19th century. He heads a team of sociologists, anthropologists and other researchers who are striving for a better understanding of the language used to describe disease and mortality during a transitional era in medical history. It’s part of the longer-term Connecticut River Historical Demography Project, led by Anderton and anthropology professor Alan Swedlund.

The study is based in Massachusetts because it was the first state that required municipal governments to record every death with a physician-certified cause. “Massachusetts,” Anderton says, “was first in a lot of things.”

The period covered by the Grammars of Death study, 1850 to 1912, was crucial in the evolution of medical science, a time when germ theory was replacing a belief in “vapors” or “miasmas,” when practices such as bleeding and dosing with mercury were going out of favor and when doctors were beginning to value such basic hygiene practices as washing their hands before and after treating each new patient.

The antique death records Anderton is studying often provide a revealing picture of social class issues and cultural attitudes relating to sickness and death. For example, Anderton says, since stillbirth and infant mortality were once widely regarded as “nature’s way of culling the lower classes,” doctors sometimes viewed such deaths as natural and inevitable and didn’t bother to record a specific cause on a baby’s death certificate. In other cases, he says, doctors would fudge the truth to shield the reputations of wealthy or socially prominent patients. “If somebody died from opium addiction or some other distasteful cause, the doctor might record that as a death due to a disease of the heart.”

To understand the social context in which deaths were recorded, Anderton and his colleagues are supplementing their perusal of death certificates with data from other sources. “We’re using newspaper accounts and public health records,” he says. “We’re looking at doctors’ diaries and where the doctors were trained.”

Because the decades in question witnessed a dramatic increase in American life expectancy, it’s important for public health officials to have an accurate picture of what exactly people were dying of. Do we have reliable coronary health figures, or do we have to conclude that “heart disease” was often a euphemism for something less respectable? Can imperfect records offer any useful insights into what was killing so many infants and children, as well as women during childbirth? When someone died of “consumption” or “phthisis,” can we assume that the patient had the infection we know today as tuberculosis, or do we have to put some other construction on the antique nomenclature? Such are the questions Anderton’s study proposes to address.

Members of the Grammars of Death research team are studying documents so fragile that they threaten to crumble to dust when touched. “We’re microfilming some of them before they disintegrate,” Anderton says. “So this is also a preservation project.”

UMass Department of Sociology http://www.umass.edu/sociol/

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