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This study explores cause-specific infant mortality in Copenhagen between 1861 and 1911, using newly available individual-level data from The Copenhagen Burial Register, as part of a larger comparative project within the SHiP network (Studying the history of Health in Port Cities). The aim is to determine the dominant cause of death patterns for infants and to explore how the ICD10h coding system performs with the Danish individual-level historical causes of death. The results show that in Copenhagen, infant mortality began a distinct decline during the period of study (1861–1911), but the city experienced only very few changes in the cause of death pattern. While a transition from symptomatic to more specific causes of death took place over time, the largest killers overall were the water-food borne and airborne diseases, with a respectively summer and winter peak. The airborne and water-food borne diseases were mainly dominant amongst the post-neonates, whose mortality made up an increasingly larger share of infant deaths. Finally, the results show that although coding the Danish causes of death to the ICD10h has proven successful, more attention needs to be paid to different uses of the same cause of death by different nations, such as the case of atrophy.Louise LudvigsenUniversity of CopenhagenBarbara Revuelta-EugerciosDanish National Archives Anne LøkkeUniversity of Copenhagen, This study explores cause-specific infant mortality in Copenhagen between 1861 and 1911, using newly available individual-level data from The Copenhagen Burial Register, as part of a larger comparative project within the SHiP network (Studying the history of Health in Port Cities). The aim is to determine the dominant cause of death patterns for infants and to explore how the ICD10h coding system performs with the Danish individual level-historical causes of death. The results show that in Copenhagen, infant mortality began a distinct decline during the period of study (1861–1911), but the city experienced only very few changes in the cause of death pattern. While a transition from symptomatic to more specific causes of death took place over time, the largest killers overall were the water-food borne and airborne diseases, with a respectively summer and winter peak. The airborne and water-food borne diseases were mainly dominant amongst the post-neonates, whose mortality made up an increasingly larger share of infant deaths. Finally, the results show that although coding the Danish causes of death to the ICD10h has proven successful, more attention needs to be paid to different uses of the same cause of death by different nations, such as the case of atrophy.

The emancipatory possibilities brought by computational methods to digital archives are enormously exciting, not least in the building of historical population databases. Around the world, and especially in the Nordic countries, demand for historical population databases is driven by researchers in diverse fields including history, the social sciences, and medicine. Designed to provide individual and multigenerational data, these databases extend registry-based research back several generations before the introduction of modern registration systems. However, the term “data” is often positioned in relation to neutrality and objectivity and frequently discussed in the language of the natural sciences as a raw material. In transforming digitised collections into data, we address potential oversights when exploiting new computational opportunities. This chapter takes the Denmark-based Link-Lives project, housed at the Danish National Archives, as our empirical point of departure to analyse the multiple steps in source selection and transformation of non-digital records into research data, addressing the different logic, motivations, and challenges (human and algorithmic) as well as the actors involved and the consequences of each. We discuss this using FAIR principles and propose a model that captures the various complexities. Our work is of interest especially to those engaged in transforming archival records into research datasets.

Large-scale historical databases featuring individual-level causes of death offer the potential for longitudinal studies of health and illnesses. There is, however, a risk that the transformation of the primary sources into ‘data’ may strip them of the very qualities required for proper medical historical analysis. Based on a pilot study of all 11,100 deaths registered in Copenhagen in 1880–1881, we identify, analyse and discuss the challenges of transcribing and coding cause of death sources into a database. The results will guide us in building Link-Lives, a database featuring close to all nine million Danish deaths from 1787 to 1968. The main challenge is how to accommodate different older medical rationales in one classification system. Our key finding is multi-coding with more than one version of the ICD system (e.g. ICD-1893 and ICD-10) can be used as a novel method to systematically handle historical causes of death over time.

Sickness funds information has given conflicting evidence on the evolution of morbidity during the mortality decline. Evidence on increased morbidity has been explained by an actual increase of morbidity, a cultural inflation of morbidity or changing institutional settings, however, morbidity rates have also been shown to be stable over time when age composition of members is controlled for. Most previous studies have been confined to data on men; however, in an earlier article, Castenbrandt found large gender differences in historical sick leave by using national statistics on both men and women. To move forward, this article aims to analyse trends in sickness claims during the mortality decline in the early twentieth century using individual level data from Swedish sickness funds covering the period 1898–1950. Concretely, we investigate gender differences in sickness claims (incidence and duration) and how institutional settings (member composition and fund-specific regulations) affected the sick leave patterns.

Middle names in Denmark have a long and varied history. Today, approximately one in three Danes has a middle name; until the 19th century, however, such names were used almost exclusively among the nobility, with lesser usage among the clergy and bourgeoisie. During the 19th century, Denmark underwent profound societal changes and saw the introduction of restrictive naming legislation. These may have had an impact on the increasing usage of middle names across a larger part of the population, which can be read out of a comparison of the names registered in the Danish censuses of 1787 and 1880. This survey explores the changing usage of middle names during this period by analysing onomastic profiles as they occur in the Danish census of 1880, which records almost 2 million inhabitants of all ages. A methodology has been devised for identifying middle names which, with certain reservations, identifies the presence or absence of middle names in the onomastic profiles of approximately 98% of the individuals listed in the source, of which 6.2% are shown to bear a middle name. Quantitative analysis reveals large differences in usage of middle names across geography and various demographic criteria such as sex, age and relative urbanity, showing that middle names are used much more frequently among males and that frequency among both sexes increases markedly towards the end of the period under consideration. The potential forces behind these apparent disparities are discussed and some tentative conclusions drawn.

Final project for the The Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Programme 2014/2015