RESPIRATORY DISEASE AND DEATH REGISTRATION DUBLIN 1900-1902

Historians have raised attention to the lack of specificity in the reporting of respiratory diseases in national mortality records for decades. When pulmonary tuberculosis was at high levels of transmission in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, senior public health officials and campaigners were acutely aware that deaths from it were often vaguely or euphemistically described. Pathology was not an advanced domain of expertise, post-mortem examinations were not routinely carried out, and from the 1880s, the Registrar General of Ireland reported worries that acute conditions like pleurisy were being recorded instead of pulmonary tuberculosis. Ambiguity in classification, partly rooted in ontological restrictions, caused further problems for public health planning. For example, some diseases caused symptoms that could be categorised under multiple systems in accordance with the prevailing nosology. From a public health perspective the ability to manage its spread was curtailed as tuberculosis was not legally classified as a “notifiable disease.” Its inextricable links to poverty and social class, coupled with the legacy of miasma theory meant that the disease itself was heavily stigmatised and therefore concealment became yet another challenge for public health authorities to overcome. Severe symptoms of tuberculosis, of all forms, were tolerated in the community, which also played a pivotal role in its transmission. This article proposes the combined use of microhistory, prosopography and historical geography methods to explore reasons as to how pulmonary tuberculosis was potentially underrepresented in historical Big Data in the aggregate returns of the Annual Reports of the Registrar General of Ireland. By linking qualitative small data, namely coronial court inquiries to the civil registration of death records, or Big Data, during the period April 1900 to April 1902, this article not only raises questions about perceptions of wellbeing and tolerance of symptoms in the community in life, it also draws attention to how these matters were glossed over in death. Inquests can be used to identify cases in the larger dataset, so we can problematise the ways in which respiratory problems were reported and registered at a time when cases were rarely diagnosed, and treatments were ineffective. In turn by mapping individual level death registrations we can identify how certain areas or indeed houses emerged as problem sites, and expand our understanding of the historical geography of the disease.