Health and social consequences: linkages between parish registers and patient records as a source in social medical history
Keywords:
medical social history, veneral diseases, historical demography, social consequences, life and family biographies, SwedenAbstract
Venereal diseases in the Sundsvall area in Sweden are studied in this article. By using linkages between between parish records and patient records it has been possible to find out what happened to a patient after the adission to a venereal ward. The linkage gives us enough information to form life and family biographies for these individuals. By investigating the life courses of 145 linked individuals it has been possible to give a closer presentation of the preliminary conclusions and problems of this research. The major problem has to do with their mobility. A life and family biography is truncated when the individual leaves the district of Sundsvall.
The individuals of the study were admitted to a venereal ward in the midst of their adult life. While carefully paying attention to the linked individuals’ tendency to leave the Sundsvall area, we have studied their age distribution rates for certain events in their lives and reached a few preliminary conclusions about the sample group. Even among those who stayed in the district for quite a long while, the marriage rates were quite low . Some of these individuals had up to eight children, but the average fertility among the sample group seemed to be quite low. Because more than 60 percent of the children bom within the sample group died before the age of 15, and a very high percentage of these died before their first birthday, seems to be a convincing proof that venereal disease had an important impact on the patients’ lives. The article shows that linkages between patient records and parish registrars can help medical historians and historical demographers to understand the way in which disease and medical care affected peoples’ lives in past time.
