BiblioVault - Books about Statistics, Medical

American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860

James H. Cassedy

Harvard University Press, 1984

Cardiovascular Diseases in the United States

Iwao M. Moriyama, Dean E. Krueger, and Jeremiah Stamler

Harvard University Press, 1971

Cardiovascular diseases kill and disable more than a million Americans each year. The major types of this complex of diseases are coronary heart disease, hypertensive disease, cerebrovascular diseases, rheumatic heart disease, and congenital malformations of the circulatory system. Authors Moriyama, Krueger, and Stamler relate each of these types to etiology, age of patient at onset, clinical course, and socioeconomic impact on the population. For each type of cardiovascular disease they analyze the quantitative data on the incidence, prevalence, and levels and time trends of mortality and on the demographic characteristics of person affected. They also examine international differences in levels and trends in mortality and point out areas for further research. More than thirty-five figures as well as extensive tables document their text.

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Death Stalks the Yakama

Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964

Clifford E. Trafzer

Michigan State University Press, 1997

Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease.
Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.

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Epidemiology of Neurologic and Sense Organ Disorders

Leonard T. Kurland, John F. Kurtzke, and Irving D. Goldberg

Harvard University Press, 1973

This is the first book-length treatment of the frequency and distribution of neurologic and sense disorders. It is based primarily on special tabulations of mortality data for 1959–1961 applied to the U.S. census of 1960. Information on incidence, prevalence, and survivorship is provided for each major disorder and a summary chapter considers the frequency and geographic distribution of neurologic disorders in terms of age, sex, color, and demographic characteristics.

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The Frequency of the Rheumatic Diseases

Sidney Cobb

Harvard University Press, 1971

Mortality and Morbidity in the United States

Carl L. Erhardt and Joyce E. Berlin

Harvard University Press, 1974

Shadows in the Valley

A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916

Alan Swedlund

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

How does the experience of sickness, death, and loss change over time? We know that the incidence and virulence of particular diseases have varied from one period to another, as has their medical treatment. But what was it like for the individuals who suffered and died from those illnesses, for the health practitioners and institutions that attended to them, and for the families who buried and mourned them?

In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.

To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.

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