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    Custom chart of causes of death in Ireland 1864-1880 [OC]
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    Custom chart of causes of death in Ireland 1864-1880 [OC]


    This chart shows, for each age group, the 10 largest causes of death (actually, 9 plus Other) as a %. Because there were so many different causes, I did not create a series for each, but created only 10 series, and populated the values, colours and labels programmatically in Excel.

    I think the result is effective, showing how different causes dominated each age group. The high percentage of "Unknown" is mainly because many people died at home, far from medical assistance or diagnosis, and cause of death was reported by relatives. It was often vague, like fever and convulsions, or improbable, like teething. The number of different childhood causes is striking, many of which have fortunately been overcome by medical advances.

    TB stands out as a major killer, particularly of young to middle age adults, devastating many developing families. I estimated it knocked about 4 years off life expectancy (which was not very high, at about 50 for men and women).

    Posted by Derryogue

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    7 Comments

    1. Derryogue on

      The data comes from annual Government reports labelled “Causes of death in Ireland”. These can be hard to find, but I have a complete set if anyone is interested. The tool used to create the chart was Excel and VBA.

      Note – TB in the chart above refers to tuberculosis, aka phthisis

    3. snerp_djerp on

      Hey antivaxxers… don’t recognise half of those causes? There’s a reason for that.

    4. dysphoric-foresight on

      There are excellent records of the people buried in a number of Irish graveyards from that time. Mount Jerome, a large cemetery in Dublin, keeps records of who was buried there, where they lived, age, occupation and what they died of. The infant mortality was something like 25% in the 19th century and the leading cause of death listed was, “the damp”.

      The records are fascinating if very grim.

    5. Sorkpappan on

      Very nice! It would be cool to also see the total death rate of the bracket. Like how many of the e.g. 15-19 year olds perished in total?

      If 1/100000 of the bracket dies, then TB is not a big problem. If 1/1000 dies, then TB is a huge problem. (I fully realise that TB was a huge problem, I’m just making an example).

    6. scraperbase on

      “Old age” is not really a cause of death. There has to be a condition as a result of old age. For example lung failure or heart failure.