Originally published on September 8, 2022 (Episode 279)
Introduction
“This is a book about death and data,” writes Stephen Berry at the opening of Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). For centuries, the dead as individuals have been revered, reviled, or remembered as the “formerly living.” But Berry reminds us that it was not the famous or infamous who reshaped the modern world—it was the anonymous, the great multitude of the dead whose patterns of mortality first revealed the hidden structures of public health, social change, and human rights.
Berry argues that one of the most significant episodes in human history was the doubling of life expectancy between 1850 and 1950. That transformation, he shows, began not with dazzling medical breakthroughs, but with something more prosaic: recording causes of death in the 1850 census. Without naming or counting, no progress could be made.
About the Guest
Stephen Berry is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia. Known as a “historian of mortality,” he has authored or edited six books, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War and Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges.
For Further Investigation
Stephen Berry, Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007)
Stephen Berry (ed.), Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
Related episodes:
Healing a Divided Nation — Carole Adrienne on Civil War medicine and its transformation of care
The Great War and Modern Medicine — Thomas Helling on how WWI transformed modern practice
💬 Listen & Discuss
If progress depends on knowing, and knowing begins with naming and counting, what lessons might today’s public health crises draw from the birth of mortality data? Share your thoughts in the comments and forward this episode to someone interested in history, medicine, or numbers.
