Causes of Death in Late Imperial Ekaterinburg, Russia. Burial Records, Database, Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52024/hlcs25898Keywords:
Mortality, Causes of death registration practice, Historical causes of death, URAPP , Urals, Imperial Russia, Parish registers, Metricheskie knigiAbstract
The end of the 19th century saw marked changes in Russia's demography. However, it was still a traditional society experiencing universal marriage and high birth and death rates. This paper analyzes mortality in Ekaterinburg, an early industrial city in the Urals, expanding rapidly economically and demographically in the late 19th century. We focus on the deaths registration system, who decided and grouped the death causes, what factors affected the procedures, and how we can use the main death causes to understand health conditions in late imperial Russia. We used Ekaterinburg Orthodox parish death records between 1860 and 1919, transcribed into the URAPP database, to analyze how the system of death registration including death causes, developed then. The Ekaterinburg clergy keeping the parish registers took on this task seriously: more than 99% of the death records contained death causes. Our analyses show that diagnosis precision depended on the parish staff, even though their medical knowledge was mostly inadequate. We used the ICD-10 system to encode death causes, distributing them between 15 main groups. As a result, we could identify 88% of all causes of death in our dataset. The most common among adult Ekaterinburgers were infectious diseases, tuberculosis claiming most victims. The second and third most common killers were fever with unspecified etiology called Goriachka and "old age". Since Goriachka declined along with an increase in respiratory diseases and tuberculosis death rates, the latter was likely the real cause, but disguised obsoletely as Goriachka. The diagnostics improved during the late 19th-early 20th century, when the revised nomenclature required a more professional and modern approach. We plan to extend our research after 1920 to study the centralized Soviet system. The social differentials we found between the city's parishes will be explored with new variables. Finally, to make the research more compatible, we plan switching to ICD-10h.
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