Eilidh Garrett

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Edinburgh

This paper investigates the feasibility of using pre-trained generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the assignment of ICD-10 codes to historical causes of death. Due to the complex narratives often found in historical causes of death, this task has traditionally been manually performed by coding experts. We evaluate the ability of GPT-...

Objectives With the increasing digital availability of large population databases of historical census or vital event records, the tasks of storing, cleaning, processing, linking and analysing such data become more challenging. Suitable computing platforms and software systems are required to handle such databases, and facilitate the application of...

Objectives Linkage of data containing personal information allows extensive studies in the health and social sciences for population level studies. However, real-world linkage applications often lack ground truth (GT) data, generally due to privacy concerns, which hinders linkage quality assessment. We propose a method to assess the linkage of sens...

Objective There has been little work on the high level of mortality, noted that the time, in coal mining areas during the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Increased risk during viral infection from exposure to particulates (eg cigarette smoke, air pollution) has been studied. ApproachWe use the historic administrative data for Scotland, 1900 to 1930, with...

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines’ observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across differen...

This paper examines the causes of infant mortality for the port town of Ipswich between 1872 and 1909. Ipswich is the only town in England for which a complete run of computer-readable, individual-level causes of death are available in the late 19th and early 20th century. Our work makes use of the ICD10h coding system being developed to contribute...

IntroductionThe Digitising Scotland project (https://digitisingscotland.ac.uk/) has transcribed all Scottish birth, death, and marriage certificates from 1855 to 1974. The linkage of these data will provide formidable challenges for linkage experts and a multitude of opportunities for health and social science researchers. Objectives and approachWe...

We use individual-level census data for England and Wales for the period 1851–1911 to investigate the interplay between social class and geographical context determining patterns of childbearing during the fertility transition. We also consider the effect of spatial mobility or lifetime migration on individual fertility behavior in the early phases...

The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring togeth...

Traditionally, record linkage is concerned with linking pairs of records across data sets and the classification of such pairs into matches (assumed to refer to the same individual) and non-matches (assumed to refer to different individuals). Increasingly, however, more complex data sets are being linked where often the aim is to identify groups, o...

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we...

This article produces the first findings on changes in household and family structure in England and Wales during 1851–1911, using the recently available Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) – a complete count database of individual-level data extending to some 188 million records. As such, it extends and updates the important overview article publi...

This contribution examines the relationship between local population studies and the national picture by considering the example of the Victorian fertility transition in England and Wales. It begins by summarising the history of research into the fertility decline. It then describes a recent project, the Atlas of Fertility Decline, which has used t...

This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a decl...

This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a decl...

This paper examines the effect of variable reporting and coding practices on the measurement of maternal mortality in urban and rural Scotland, 1861-1901, using recorded causes of death and women who died within six weeks of childbirth. This setting provides data (n = 604 maternal deaths) to compare maternal mortality identified by cause of death w...

This paper examines the effect of variable reporting and coding practices on the measurement of maternal mortality in urban and rural Scotland, 1861-1901, using recorded causes of death and women who died within six weeks of childbirth. This setting provides data (n=604 maternal deaths) to compare maternal mortality identified by cause of death wit...

The 1911 censuses of the British Isles included questions directed at currently married women, relating to the number of children they had borne in that marriage, the number of those children who were still alive and the number who had died. With the help of the demographic techniques of indirect estimation, the answers to such questions can be mad...

The release of national, individual-level census data for Scotland, via the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project undertaken at the University of Essex, makes it possible to identify the number of Scotland’s residents by their county and parish of birth on each census night from 1851 to 1901. This chapter uses the anonymous I-CeM data for 187...

A large amount of the research undertaken in an attempt to discover the reasons underlying the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mortality decline in Britain has relied on the statistics published by the Registrars General. The processes by which individual causes of death are recorded and then processed in order to create the statistics...

This paper examines causes of neonatal death in two contrasting Scottish communities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Individual death certificates allow comparison of the causes as recorded by different doctors and by lay informants. The paper finds that doctors almost always offer a medical-sounding cause of death, but that causes of...

The article focuses on the existence and extent of living same-name siblings in England. Razzell's position is that there were no, or an insignificant number of, living same-name siblings by the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, if, in a series of baptisms, a subsequent son or daughter is given the same name as an older sibling, then th...

In 1906, Sir George Newman's 'Infant Mortality: A Social Problem', one of the most important health studies of the twentieth century, was published. To commemorate this anniversary, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading academics to evaluate Newman's critical contribution, to review current understandings of the history o...

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative ev...

It is well known that children born out of wedlock are a particularly vulnerable group, but the reasons why are less clear. This paper uses longitudinal demographic records (created by linking the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths to decennial censuses, 1861-1901) to investigate the extent of and reasons for the mortality penalty amon...

The paper compares two contrasting communities. Skye, where the population lived almost exclusively in rural surroundings in widely dispersed settlements with Gaelic as their mother tongue, had little in common with the urban centre of Ipswich. However, by comparing the demographic experience of two such places from the seldom available, longitudin...

This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included...

This article offers a radical reinterpretation of the chronology of control over reproduction in England's history. It argues that, as a result of post-World War II policy preoccupations, there has been too narrow a focus in the literature on the significance of reductions in marital fertility. In England's case this is conventionally dated to have...

Comments penned in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras leave few doubts that many contemporaries believed that women's work (in the sense of paid employment), particularly that of married women, was bad for babies. Mothers who were employed in industry received particular condemnation, accused by their critics of abandoning their children with th...

Sonya O. Rose, Limited livelihoods: gender and class in nineteenth-century England. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.) Pages xi+292. - Volume 12 Issue 3 - EILIDH GARRETT

Debates concerning the origins and development of the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century declines in marital fertility and infant mortality in England and Wales have been centred largely on the material provided by answers to the ‘special’ questions in the 1911 Census. In their published form these figures have restricted researchers to an...

The Steam Engine Makers' Society (SEM), and early national engineering trade union, recorded each payment of its sickness benefit to individual members, and also listed all members each year. Nominal linkage techniques have been used to reconstruct individual histories of absence from work due to sickness from these data, link the resultant histori...

RésuméLongtemps on a cru que le travail de la femme mariée était lié au bas niveau de fertilité des mâles actifs dans certains emplois. En utilisant des dénombrements il est possible d'examiner l'attitude des couples pour ce qui regarde la fertilité, à l'aide d'un bon nombre de combinaisons des divers emplois. Cet article nous apprend que l'on trou...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sheffield, 1986. 3 vols.