Have you ever tried to read the cause of death on a death certificate and found it completely incomprehensible due to the poor handwriting of the person who completed the form? I have! Luckily for us all, there is another way to figure out what it says.
In the 1800’s, the importance of creating a uniform system of classifying diseases was recognized, so, in 1893, the International Statistical Institute adopted the first International classification of diseases. It was based on the French Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, developed by Jacques Bertillon. In 1898 the American Public Health Association recommended that the United States use that system and that it be revised every decade. In the following years Bertillon’s classification became known as the International List of Causes of Death and ultimately as the ICD.
The ICD contains a description of all known diseases and injuries. Each disease given a code number and is listed with its diagnostic characteristics. These codes are listed on death certificates after 1898. I have found them on many death certificates, but not all of them!
Look at the death certificate below, I have put a red box around the ICD code, 46a. The next step is to look up the code and find out what it means. The website, http://www.wolfbane.com/icd/index.html, has an index to each version of the ICD since 1898. The version you look at is based on the date of your document. Since Mary Myers died in 1932, I would use Revision 4 from 1929.
Code 46 reads “Cancer of the digestive organs and peritoneum”. In Mary’s case senility was listed as a contributing factor, as she was 89 years old at the time.
In 1972, my great-grandfather, Charles Myers died of heart failure. It is easy to read on the death certificate, but I looked up the code 412.3 to see if it gave any additional information.
412.3 reads “Chronic ischaemic heart disease with or without cardiovascular disease without mention of hypertension.
I wasn’t familiar with the term ischaemic, so I look it up and found that “Ischaemic heart disease is a disease characterized by reduced blood supply to the heart.” (https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/ischaemic_heart_disease.htm)
If you are interested in learning more about the cause of death of your family members, this is a great resource!
