Addressing health. Collecting and coding causes of morbidity from the United Kingdom, 1860–1908

This article describes the creation of a new dataset on historical morbidity. The data derive from 26,500 United Kingdom Post Office pension records covering the period 1860–1908. Each of these forms contained information on the health of a postal worker applying for retirement. This information took the form of a cause of retirement, often medical in nature, and a table providing the number of sick days taken in each of the ten years prior to their retirement. The article describes the source in detail before covering the means of digitisation from imaging through transcription, checking and coding. It details some of the recent publications using this dataset before concluding with some suggestions for future research and comparative work.