Preliminary Programme

Within the historiography of vital statistics in Britain, while birth and death registration has received fairly detailed attention by scholars, there has been little specifically on stillbirth. And yet, the stillborn were a point of contention from the very outset of registration. Indeed, this aspect of both fertility and mortality elicited substantial debate amongst the legal, medical and statistical professions, particularly from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Not until 1939 did they become a part of the vital statistics of Scotland when their registration was effected by the Registration of Still-Births (Scotland) Act. Essentially this legislation extended a similar provision which had been introduced in England and Wales over a decade earlier, but with one important and innovative additional provision – that a statement of the cause or probable cause of death was required from the doctor or midwife in attendance. Those statistics accumulated by the Scottish Registrar General through stillbirth registration, and his analyses of that data, quickly became an invaluable resource to those wishing to gain greater insight into infant and maternal mortality, and stimulated much discussion of the medico-social problem of stillbirth in Britain.

This paper is based on a Wellcome-funded project which examines the history of the General Register Office for Scotland, and exploits hitherto unused records which have been made available by the Registrar General of Scotland. It will explore the impulses and constraints which resulted in the eventual registration of stillbirths in Scotland. The international context was important here, with the perceived need to standardise both definitions of and methods of compiling infantile mortality and stillbirth rates in order to facilitate national comparisons at a time when fertility and ‘race suicide’ fears were particularly acute. The paper will also suggest that both discussions around, and the vital statistics generated by, stillbirth registration contributed significantly to social and medical awareness of the newborn. Previously considered to be unworthy of permanent record because they were deemed to lack a legal existence, and difficult to analyse due to lack of data, registration focused widespread statistical and medical attention on the stillborn for the first time. (Show less)

Occupational mortality differentials in nineteenth century England have long attracted the attention of historians. Contemporaries believed, and subsequent work has confirmed, that the mortality of miners, both of coal and of metals (such as tin and lead) was higher than the average, despite many of them living in apparently healthy rural environments.

This paper analyses the mortality of a similar group of rural workers in an extractive industry, the stone quarriers of the Isle of Purbeck in the English county of Dorset. These stone ‘quarriers’ were more accurately described as ‘stone miners’ since they worked underground in narrow shafts.

The analysis makes use of two databases. The first has been created by nominal record linkage of the census enumerators’ books and the Church of England burial registers. This database can be used to produce estimates of mortality at ages from one year upwards. The second database has been created by linking together the Church of England baptism and burial registers, and produces estimates of mortality at ages under five years. Used in combination, therefore, the two databases allow the estimation of age-specific death rates at all ages, and hence statistics such as the expectation of life at birth. The age-specific death rates are estimated using a two-state model of the transition from life to death.

The results are compared with mortality statistics published by the Registrar General of England and Wales (on the basis of the civil registers of deaths) for the Registration District of Wareham, in which Purbeck is situated. The levels of mortality estimated for the whole population of the Isle of Purbeck are close to those produced by the Registrar General for the Wareham Registration District. The stone quarriers, however, had, as expected, heavier mortality levels than the rest of the population of Purbeck. Closer inspection, however, reveals that their high mortality was confined to males, and was almost entirely due to especially high mortality among boys aged less than five years. In contrast to the situation with coal and other metal miners, adult male mortality among stone workers was no higher than that among the general population.

The final section of the paper speculates about the explanation for these results. One possibility is that genetic factors are implicated. The Purbeck stone quarriers were distinctive in that recruitment into the occupation was exclusively by descent (only the sons of stone quarriers could themselves become quarriers), a practice which had been written into statute since the seventeenth century. The result was that the nineteenth-century stone workers were descended over many generations from a very few individuals. (Show less)

The demography of nineteenth-century Scotland covers a wide spectrum: the Highland region was characterised by late marriage but high marital fertility and low infant mortality, whereas in other areas marriage was earlier but marital fertility lower and infant mortality higher. This paper will use a data set of linked births, deaths and marriages registered between 1861 and 1901, also linked to the family living arrangements and socio-economic circumstances provided by the intervening decennial censuses, for the highland island of Skye and the lowland town of Kilmarnock, to try to establish the roots of the differences in infant life chances. Using multivariate hazard analysis, it will investigate whether infants in the rural crofting highlands were protected by a benign environment, healthy mothers, or strong familial support networks. (Show less)

The author tests the under-researched but widely held
hypothesis linking poverty and HIV/Aids in the Eastern Cape
Province. If poverty does not underlie AIDS transmission,
recommendations to alleviate poverty as a way to fight HIV
might be incongruous and even irresponsible. The author uses
case level data which has a broad age range and includes
both genders. The ante natal clinic (anc) data only includes
pregnant women. The database is also different from the HSRC
sample which excluded children aged 0-2, prisoners, police,
army personnel and hostel dwellers . The author analyses the
new data (I) to reveal new vectors of the pandemic (ii) to
suggest that the pandemic might be related to complexes
other than poverty (Show less)

This paper investigates the role of mothers in the hospitalisation of childbirth in Sweden, 1900-1930. In American and British research the medicalisation of childbirth is usually characterised as a professional conflict between doctors and midwives, a process which went hand in hand with an increased control of the women giving birth. From this perspective women are described as victims of the power of the medical male profession. In the Swedish case, however, such a narrative is empirically questionable. By focusing on the hospitalisation of childbirth in Sundsvall -- an early industrialised city in the northern part of the country where the local development preceded the national one -- and by drawing on demographic data as well as studying the institutional supply of different birth places, it is argued that women played a more significant role in this process than is usually presumed. Another argument developed is that it is important to pay special attention to the local practices and their effects on the institutional infrastructure on the municipal level in the formation of a national maternal and infant welfare policy. (Show less)