Disability, Mortality and Causes of Death in a 19th-Century Swedish Population

Our study aims to find how disability affected human health in historical time through an examination ofindividuals' mortality risks and death causes. Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic DataBase (DDB) enable us to account for a relatively high number of persons reported to have disabilities, andto compare them with a group of non-disabled cases. The findings concern a 19th-century populationof 35,610 individuals in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, and show that disability increased the prematuremortality risk substantially. Disability seems to have jeopardized men’s survival in particular, and perhaps dueto gendered expectations concerning the type of work men and women became less able to perform whendisabled. Our study of death causes indicates that their deaths were less characterized by infectious diseasesthan among the non-disabled group, as a possible consequence of lower exposure to infections due to theway in which disability could impede opportunities for interaction with peers in the community. In all, ourmortality findings suggest that disability was associated with poor living conditions and limited possibilities toparticipate in work and social life, which further tend to have accumulated across life and resulted in ill healthindicated by premature death