Essays and papers on some fallacies of statistics concerning life and death, health and disease : with suggestions towards an improved system of registration / by Henry W. Rumsey.

  • Henry Wyldbore Rumsey
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays and papers on some fallacies of statistics concerning life and death, health and disease : with suggestions towards an improved system of registration / by Henry W. Rumsey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    132/348 page 112
    (6.) Again, there are cases in which medical men are applied to for certificates of the cause of death, but for very sufficient reasons refuse to grant them. Absolute reticence is better than a vague reiteration of assertions made by illiterate attendants or interested kinsfolk. Thas, in many ways, ‘a loop-hole has been left for the careless and guilty, a loop-hole which makes the whole system of registration, in so far as it is connected with the public safety, a solemn farce.”! Yet the deficiency of medical certification does not depend upon any want of pressure—at least of moral pressure— brought to bear upon the medical profession. In the absence of the legal compulsion inflicted upon the practitioners of Scotland [1875, now the United Kingdom], no means have been spared to extract the certificate from every English doctor. The chiefs of the medical corporations, in 1837, headed an influential movement in support of a scientific registration of mortality; and after exposing the objections of some three or four individuals out of the ‘inconsiderable number—perhaps fifty persons—of the medical profession’ who had refused to return the cause of death, the Registrar-General in 1845 penned the following remarks :—/| The italics are mine. | ‘That it is the duty of the State to require from the medical attendants and to register the cause of every individual’s death which takes place in the country, appears to me incontestable ; and, as I have stated, I have found that the profession as a body, comprising more than ten thousand qualified medical practi- tioners, and all the most eminent men in all the branches of the profession, physicians, surgeons, and general practitioners, have expressed their readiness to return the causes of death in the best way the present state of medical science and their means of procuring information will admit. I have given explicit instructions that no certificate shall be received from persons known to be unqualified, or to have no diploma from either the halls, colleges, or recognised universities ; and 1 Social Science Review, March, 1864.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3