Count the Dead

Between 1850 and 1950, life expectancy worldwide roughly doubled, a change that made possible large gains in how people live and how they go about their daily lives.

The standard account of this shift focuses on medical discoveries: Jenner's vaccination, Lister's antisepsis, Snow's germ theory, and Fleming's penicillin. Berry argues that much of the credit belongs to the people who spent their careers gathering reliable information about deaths.

Count the Dead traces the growth of death registration in the United States, from the mortality census of 1850 to the arrival of the death certificate around the turn of the century. Berry contends that mortality records reshaped life on Earth and became essential to organizing public health, reporting casualties, and protecting human rights. He follows a network of coroners, court officials, and state and federal authorities who devised ways to track deaths and expose the patterns within them. By putting these records to work, they turned the dead into a source of information, and in doing so gave the dead a role in shaping how people live and die today.