During the eighteen years between the introduction of civil registration in England (1837) and Scotland (1855), the drive for nationwide vital statistics coincided with the emergence of meteorology as a scientific discipline. Scotland’s inaugural registrar general, William Pitt Dundas, proposed the first motion that established the Scottish Meteorological Society (SMS) in 1855. The inaugural superintendent of statistics at the GROS, James Stark, was the first secretary of the SMS. In this article I investigate the influence of climatic analysis on the earliest statistical work of the GROS. The divergence between Stark and William Farr at the GRO on the principal regulator of urban mortality, and the classification of cause of death, was amplified by their contrasting approach to climate determinism. Stark’s annual reports have left historians with mortality data derived from principles different to those in England as well as a body of climate observations correlated with morbidity and fatality. In Stark’s hands these statistics offered an approach to public health reform that cut across miasmic and sanitary explanations. The article explores the influence of climate determinism on the construction of what remains some of the most fundamental data that historians and epidemiologists rely upon.
Graeme Morton (Fri,) studied this question.