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Abstract
This study follows around 500 disabled individuals over their lifespan to examine their risks of dying in 19th-century society, in comparison to a reference group of non-disabled people. The aim is to detect whether people, due to their disability, had a higher probability of meeting an untimely death. We use Sweden’s 19th-century parish registers to identify people the ministers defined as disabled, and to construct a reference group of individuals who were not affected by these disabilities. By combining the deviance theories from sociology studies with demographic sources and statistical methods, we achieve new insight into how life developed for disabled people in past societies. The results suggest that disability significantly jeopardized the survival of individuals, particularly men, but also that the type of disability had an impact. Altogether, we can demonstrate that the disabled constituted a disadvantaged but heterogeneous group of people whose demography and life courses must be further researched.
Acknowledgements
Our research is partly conducted within a project led by Lotta Vikström, ‘Experiences of disabilities in life and online: Life course perspectives on disabled people from past society to present’, which enjoys funding from one Wallenberg Foundation (Stiftelsen Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs Minnesfond). The authors are grateful to the two reviewers for their useful comments on the paper. We are also grateful for the feedback we received from the discussant and chair, Professor Alicia Bercovich, when an earlier draft of this paper was presented at the session ‘Trends and differentials in disability: Challenges in measurement’, at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) Conference in Busan, Republic of Korea, 26–31August 2013. We are also grateful for the feedback we received when the results were presented at The Nordic Network for Health Research within Social Sciences and the Humanities (NNHSH) conference, ‘Creative and Able Citizens: Managing Health and Illness during the Life Course’, in Helsinki, 22–23May 2014. We also wish to thank our colleagues at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research and the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, for providing suggestions on how to advance our analytical approach and for being most helpful with constructing the data retrieval from the digitized parish registers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Mont, ‘Measuring Health and Disability’; Priestley, Disability, 175–9; Jaeger and Bowman, ‘Understanding Disability’, X; Kudlick, ‘Disability History’; Solvang, ‘The Emergence’; Froestad and Ravneberg, ‘Education Policy’, 120; Brändström, ‘A Life After Dismissal?’.
2 Lee, Campbell, and Bengtsson, ‘New Malthusian Perspectives’, 3–4.
3 Later on Statistics Sweden. See Sköld, Kunskap och kontroll.
4 Willner, Det svaga könet?, 9–10; Alter, Manfredini, and Nystedt, ‘Gender Differences in Mortality’, 327–38.
5 Willner, Det svaga könet?, 9–15; Fridlizius, ‘Sex-Differential Mortality’; Edvinsson, Den osunda staden, 192–204; Nilsson, Mot bättre hälsa; Söderberg, Jonsson, and Persson, A Stagnation Metropolis; Puranen, Tuberkulos, 288.
6 Edvinsson, Den osunda staden; Nilsson, Mot bättre hälsa; Kertzer and Barbagli, ‘Introduction’, XIX–XXI.
7 Veirman, Breaking the Silence, 526–34.
8 In Olsson’s study, Att leva som lytt, the disabled include those who were visually impaired, speaking/hearing impaired, crippled, suffering from falling sickness, or mentally deficient, as well as those with several disabilities.
9 Olsson, Att leva som lytt, 184–7.
10 Ibid.
11 Jaeger and Bowman, Understanding Disability, 10–14; Kudlick, ‘Disability History’.
12 Borsay, Disability and Social Policy, 1, 12–13.
13 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability, 18–19.
14 Kudlick, ‘Disability History’, 766.
15 Oliver, The Politics of Disablement.
16 Stone, The Disabled State.
17 Hutchison, A History of Disability.
18 Mayer and Tuma, ‘Life Course Research’, 4–9; Giele and Elder, ‘Life Course Research’.
19 Giele and Elder, ‘Life Course Research’; Elder, Kirkpatrick Johnson, and Crosnoe, ‘The Emergence and Development’, 10–14.
20 Priestley, Disability; Siminski, ‘Patterns of Disability’.
21 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability, 42–3; Becker, Outsiders, 9–14.
22 Lemert, Human Deviance, 17–18.
23 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability, 42–4; Goffman, Stigma.
24 Susman, ‘Disability, Stigma and Deviance’, 16.
25 Susman, ‘Disability, Stigma and Deviance’, 21.
26 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability, 47–8.
27 Susman, ‘Disability, Stigma and Deviance’, 15–17; Kudlick, ‘Disability History’.
28 Haage, ‘Identifying Disability’.
29 Becker, Outsiders; Goffman, Stigma.
30 Alm Stenflo, Demographic Description.
31 Edvinsson, ‘Social Differences’, 78.
32 Vikström, Edvinsson, and Brändström, ‘Longitudinal Databases’, 109–28.
33 Nilsdotter Jeub, Parish Records.
34 Grönvik and Söder, Bara funktionshindrad?; Mont, ‘Measuring Health and Disability’; Olsson, Omsorg & Kontroll; Rogers and Nelson, ‘Lapps, Finns, Gypsies, Jews, 61–79; According to Ian Hacking, it is reasonable to treat the categories of people with disabilities as social constructions although they are genuinely human and defined by society; see Hacking, Social konstruktion av vad?.
35 Grönvik and Söder, Bara funktionshindrad?.
36 The concepts of disabilities used in this paper are those commonly used by 19th-century society. While some concepts may be offensive to some readers due to the derogatory meaning they carry today, we have no intention to offend. The problem of using concepts which can be apprehended as offensive has been discussed, see e.g. Eggeby, ‘Avvita, galen, sinnessvag’, 543.
37 SFS No. 64 1859, valid from 1 January 1860.
38 This means that the non-disabled people in our study were non-blind, non-deaf mute, non-crippled, non-idiot, and non-insane. Non-disabled individuals could have other marks in the registers, such as ‘sick’.
39 See e.g. Veirman, Breaking the Silence; Vikström, ‘Illuminating the Impact’, 81–117; Vikström, ‘Before and after Crime’, 861–88.
40 Broström, Event History Analysis.
41 Thiébaut and Bénichou, ‘Choice of Time-Scale’, 3803–20; Korn, Graubard, and Midthune, ‘Time-to-Event Analysis’, 72–80.
42 See e.g. Olsson, Att leva som lytt, 184–7.
43 We selected the father’s occupation at the start of the observation of the individuals under study or immediately before. The socio-economic status is divided into three categories because of small numbers in some of the groups.
44 The DDB classification does not completely correspond to the two commonly used classification schemes in historical studies – SOCPO and HISCLASS – but there are many similarities between them. Leeuwen and Maas, HISCO; Van de Putte and Miles, ‘A Social Classification Scheme’. For a comparison between the schemes, see the Appendix in Edvinsson and Broström, ‘Old Age, Health, and Social Inequality’.
45 See e.g. Willner, Det svaga könet?, 219–23; Bengtsson and Dribe, ‘The Late Emergence’, 396; Edvinsson and Lindkvist, ‘Wealth and Health’, 383.
46 See e.g. Bengtsson and Broström, ‘Mortality Crises’, 1–2; Bengtsson, ‘Living Standards and Economic Stress’, 37; Veirman, Breaking the Silence, 528–9.
47 Schisterman, Cole, and Platt, ‘Overadjustment Bias’, 488–95. In another paper, we analyse and discuss the event of marriage among disabled people, see Haage, Vikström, and Häggström Lundevaller, ‘Disabled and Unmarried?’. It appears that they confronted markedly lower marital chances compared with non-disabled individuals. While about 40% of the latter married during observation time, only 25% of the disabled people did.
48 Janssens, ‘The Rise and Decline’.
49 See e.g. Alm Stenflo, Demographic Description; Edvinsson, Den osunda staden; Willner, Det svaga könet?.
50 Giele and Elder, ‘Life Course Research’; Elder, Kirkpatrick Johnson, and Crosnoe, ‘The Emergence and Development’; Vikström, ‘Illuminating the Impact of Incarceration’, 81–117; Vikström, ‘Before and after Crime’, 861–88.
51 Janssens, ‘The Rise and Decline’, 3, 9.
52 For example, Eggeby, ‘Avvita, galen, sinnessvag’; Riving, Icke som en annan människa; Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability; Stiker, A History of Disability.
53 Kearns, ‘The Urban Penalty’, 233–4. With this concept, Kearns argues that mortality was higher in towns compared to rural areas during the 19th century, explaining that this was partly due to urbanization and changes in diet.
54 Tedebrand, ‘Gamla och nya stadsbor efter 1860’, 101–3; Liliequist, ‘Stadsplanering och bebyggelseutveckling från 1621 fram till branden 1888’, 136–7.
55 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare, Exploring Disability, 18–20.
56 Razzel and Spence, ‘The Hazards of Wealth’, 388.
57 Edvinsson, Den osunda staden, 211–12; Bengtsson and Dribe, ‘The Late Emergence’, 396–8.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Helena Haage
Helena Haage is a PhD student in History at Umeå University. She is currently working on a thesis uncovering the life courses of disabled people in the 19th-century Sundsvall region. Through demographic data and statistical methods, her research pictures disabled people’s living conditions in comparison with non-disabled layers of the population.
Erling Häggström Lundevaller
Erling Häggström Lundevaller is a Doctor of Statistics at Umeå University, researching demographic issues, analysing both the historical and more modern data stored at the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University.
Lotta Vikström
Lotta Vikström is Professor of History at Umeå University. She makes use of demographic data and methods to research individuals’ position and experience in past society and to gain knowledge about gendered and socio-economic issues that confronted vulnerable people of historical populations, such as paupers, offenders, indigenous individuals, and people with disabilities.