Consumption, Dropsy, and Apoplexy: Archaic Causes of Death

What old cause-of-death terms meant, why they read that way, and how to decode them



Consumption is pulmonary tuberculosis. Dropsy is edema, the swelling that builds when the heart, kidneys, or liver are failing. Apoplexy is a stroke. All 3 turn up constantly on nineteenth-century American death records, and none of them is a diagnosis in the modern sense. Each names what could be seen from the outside, which was most of what a doctor had to go on before laboratory testing.


Why the Wording Is So Vague


You will meet these words in newspaper articles, especially obituaries, in death records, and on the federal mortality schedules taken every 10 years from 1850 to 1880. Those schedules exist because there was no national vital registration; for one year in each decade they were the only nationwide count of who died and of what. The enumerator asked the head of household about family members who had died in the 12 months ending 31 May, and wrote down what he was told. Only in 1880 did the form add a column for the attending physician's name, and the enumerator was told to write None where there had been no physician at all.


Registration itself came late and unevenly. Each state began recording deaths at its own pace, and it was not until 1933 that every state had death certificates being recorded. Outside New England and a few industrial states, then, no one was obliged to record a cause of death until well into the twentieth century.


Terms You Will Meet Often


  • Consumption, phthisis, or decline: pulmonary tuberculosis, which accounted for nearly 1 in 10 deaths in nineteenth-century America.
  • Dropsy: edema. Enumerators were told to name the site, so you will see dropsy of the chest and dropsy of the abdomen.
  • Apoplexy: a stroke, though it was sometimes written for any sudden collapse and death.
  • Bloody flux: dysentery.
  • Summer complaint: diarrhea in infants, generally in hot weather.
  • Marasmus: wasting in an infant, from malnutrition or an underlying illness.
  • Milk sickness: poisoning from the milk of cows that had grazed on white snakeroot, common in the Ohio Valley and the cause of Nancy Hanks Lincoln's death in 1818.
  • La grippe: influenza.
  • Teething: written across thousands of infant deaths, and in practice an admission that nobody knew.
  • Childbed fever: puerperal fever, a bacterial infection following childbirth.
  • Brain fever: meningitis or encephalitis.
  • Quinsy: a severe tonsil infection, what is now called a peritonsillar abscess.
  • Lockjaw: tetanus.
  • Ague: malaria, marked by recurring chills and fever.
  • Falling sickness: epilepsy.


What the Term Cannot Tell You


A symptom is not a cause. Dropsy says fluid was collecting; it does not say whether the heart, the kidneys, or the liver gave out. Consumption was applied loosely to almost any wasting illness, so it sometimes covers stonecutters and miners who really had silicosis. Fever standing by itself can mean typhus, typhoid, or malaria depending on the decade and the region, and typhoid was not reliably told apart from typhus before about 1860. Families also sometimes asked for a gentler word, which is why suicide, alcoholism, and syphilis are underrepresented on paper.


Where to Find the Original Wording


Read the image, not just the index entry. Indexers transcribe unfamiliar medical words badly, and the clerk's or enumerator's own spelling is part of the evidence. Our death records directory, organized by state, can help you locate where a given area's death records are held.


Where no certificate was ever filed, a church burial register, a cemetery sexton's book, or an undertaker's ledger sometimes records a cause in the same old vocabulary.



Need help finding more records? We have genealogy research services available. You can also try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1.3 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.


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