Tuberculosis in the United States : Prepared for the International Congress on Tuberculosis, Washington, September 21 to October 12, 1908. Department of Commerce and Labor.

  • United States. Bureau of the Census.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tuberculosis in the United States : Prepared for the International Congress on Tuberculosis, Washington, September 21 to October 12, 1908. Department of Commerce and Labor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    lungs, peritoneum, pleura, spine, stomach, and bowels; influenza; teething; whooping cough. Does the list seem extreme ? Is it possible that physicians legally authorized to practice medicine Avill make such _._ , • p 1 ^ 1 J^ p ji !• Difficulty of securing cor- retums m cases or actual death ti'om tuberculosis, rect statements of deaths from and that the registration officials will gravely tuberculosis. accept such certificates and compile them as official statistics? In regard to the latter point, most registration offices are compelled to accept what they can get; the attending pliysician is the sole arbiter as to what shall be said or not be said upon the certificate of death. And the absence of any standard nomenclature of diseases in this country renders it difficult for even the careful and intelligent physi- cian to know how to report the cause of death in many cases. Add to this the protean forms of tuberculosis, the difficulty of its diagnosis in some cases, the unwillingness of the attending phj^^sician to sign the certificate of death of a patient whose illness from this disease he may have failed to report as required by law, and perhaps the fact that the occurrence of the death from this cause may be thought undesirable as a matter of record by the friends or relatives, or may, perchance, conflict with representations made in applications for policies of insurance—there are reasons enough why many deaths from tuber- culosis should not be reported and hence not be compiled under this cause. Every registrar is familiar with such cases. A careful and fairly conservative estimate worked out along this line on the basis of the total number of deaths registered in the registration area and enumerated in the nonregistration area during the last decennial census year—with allowance for increase of population and incom- plete total number of deaths—showed that about 190,000 deaths might fairly be considered to have occurred in the United States dar- ing the year 1907 from tuberculosis or from causes that might be considered, in the proportion assigned, as probably tuberculosis. DISCUSSION OF TABLES. Only the most important general indications relating to the incidence of tuberculosis are shown in the brief series of tables presented. For more Reference tables beginning . . . '^^ P3ge 49- detailed data, and especially for statistics relating to individual localities, reference should be made to the original reports, which are, chiefly, the Vital Statistics of the Twelfth Census, 1900, and the annual reports on Mortality Statistics, 1900 to 1904 (published in one volume), 1905, and 1906. Mortality Statis- tics, 1907, is in preparation and Avill be issued soon after the close of the Cono-ress.