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16
Comparing tables 3 and 6 it will be seen that there are many discrepancies
in the totals for the different causes of death. This, apart
from error in computation, may be due to several causes. For example,
the death returns as they arrive in the office do not always clearly indicate
the basic cause of death, and this has sometimes to be deduced. A
death certificate may show three or four or even more diseases and
unless the basic cause is clearly specified it may have to be taken as
a probability. Furthermore, doctors will ascribe deaths to various
basic causes according to their own views as to which cause is more
basic than the others. Thus in a patient dying of cerebral haemorrhage,
which may be due to high blood pressure, which in turn may be due to
general hardening of the arteries, any one of these three causes may be
thought to be the basic one. If the patient in addition had pulmonary
tuberculosis none of the three would count but the patient's death
would be ascribed to code No. 1 (tuberculosis).
For comparative purposes therefore it is safer to group the causes
which are linked together. Thus code numbers 10 to 15 may be
regarded as all different kinds of cancer, while numbers 17 to 21 are all
diseases of the heart and circulation. Similarly 22 to 25 are best grouped
together.
Certain statistics have therefore been extracted from table 6 and
grouped in this way. They are shown in table 7 which also includes
the percentages of each social class for each disease or group of diseases.
The percentages should be compared with those shown in table 5 for all
deaths.