Top Causes of Death in Porto Alegre, 1850s and 1870s

I am happy to see that the first results of my research on disease and health in nineteenth century Brazil has been published by The Americas here. In this article, I argue that enslaved and free people were largely killed by the same things. I make this claim using data from Santos, a coastal township in Southeastern Brazil. Slaves and free didn’t share every disease in the township. For example, yellow fever killed many more people of European descent, while I found smallpox to be proportionally worse among slaves.

In the Era of Epidemics project, I am attempting to look at disease and epidemics in Brazil. To do so, I have collected data and information from a number of locations, including the far southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In its state capital, Porto Alegre, I was lucky to get my hands on an extraordinary run of cemetery data. The dataset, created by archivists in the Misericordia Hospital, includes more than 50 thousand names of slaves and free people who died between 1850 and 1896. Among many other bits of information, cause of death was usually reported

I still have a long way to go before I get this database in shape for analysis, but I was able to take a quick look at the top causes of death of enslaved and free people in the 1850s and 1870s. In the tables below, I list the afflictions that caused the most death and compare the two groups and decades. Compared to Santos, some of these diseases differed. Most notably, cholera took an enormous toll in the 1850s in Porto Alegre, especially among the slaves. This disease never became epidemic in Santos, but the 1855-56 epidemic in Porto Alegre was one of the worst urban epidemics in Brazilian history. Other diseases were shared between the two townships, including tuberculosis, smallpox, gastrointestinal diseases, and tetanus.

Top Causes of Death, Porto Alegre, 1850-1859

	disease	Slave %	Rank	Free %	Rank
1	Cholera	16.0	1	12.7	1
2	Tuberculosis	6.4	2	11.0	2
3	Diarrhea	2.9	6	6.1	3
4	Dysentery	5.4	3	4.7	4
5	Gastroenteritis	4.2	4	4.0	5
6	Tetanus	4.1	5	3.0	6
7	Smallpox	2.0	10	2.8	7
8	Heart disease	2.4	9	2.5	8
9	“Dentition”	2.5	8	2.4	9
10	Pneumonia	2.5	7	2.1	10
11	Unknown	1.3		1.6

Note: There were a total of 3181 deaths of slaves and 9298 deaths of free people.

Source: Cemetery records, Arquivo de Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre

Top Causes of Death, Porto Alegre, 1870-1879

	Disease	Slave %	Rank	Free %	Rank
1	Tuberculosis	11.7	1	11.1	1
2	Smallpox	7.1	2	5.6	3
3	Gastroenteritis	2.7	7	6.1	2
4	Heart disease	5.2	3	2.9	6
5	Bronchitis	1.0	10	3.3	5
6	Diarrhea	1.5	8	3.3	4
7	“Cerebral congestion”	3.2	6	2.7	7
8	Pneumonia	4.4	4	2.4	10
9	Tetanus	3.4	5	2.4	9
10	Birth problem	1.1	9	2.5	8
11	Unknown	3.3		9.8

Note: There were a total of 1236 deaths of slaves and 10,769 deaths of free people.

Source: Cemetery records, Arquivo de Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre

What I find interesting about these results is that while slaves and free people appear to have shared the top causes of death for the 1850s, there was greater divergence between the groups by the 1870s. I believe that this is due more to age differences than any differences in disease environments between the groups. The international slave trade ended for Brazil in 1850 and without new young slaves entering and without a capacity of this group to naturally reproduce at normal rates, slaves were part of an aging population. In contrast, the free population was expanding due to the arrival of thousands of European immigrants who were typcially single men of working age. Thus, we see that heart problems and pneumonia were proportionally worse for slaves by this decade.  

As more comes from this dataset, I will post...