Death-rates in Great Britain and Sweden. Some general regularities and their significance*

The object of this paper is to draw attention to certain regularities in the vital statistics of Great Britain, and to indicate their possible significance in interpreting the past and predicting the future. For purposes of comparison the vital statistics of Sweden have been examined from a similar point of view, and it will be shown that corresponding regularities seem to exist, though partly obscured by some influence the nature of which we are not in a position to identify. The raw material of this investigation consisted of the specific death-rates at each period for England and Wales from 1845,1 for Scotland from 1860,2 and for Sweden from 1751,3 these being the earliest periods for which reliable statistics are available. As the effects which it is intended to investigate are the general tendencies, and as emphasis is not being laid on small variations, it has been considered sufficient to use where convenient for the whole population the mean of the figures for males and females respectively, whilst, when the statistics available refer to five-yearly periods of age—e.g. 5–10 and 10–15 years—the simple mean has again been taken as the figure for the 5–15 year period. As only the relative death-rates—that is the ratios— are important, as is shown below, any slight errors involved will in large part be automatically eliminated.