One Day of Deaths in Rio de Janeiro

 "Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro Address Locator," Stanford Spatial History Lab and Cecult (UNICAMP), 2009.

This map shows the location of 18 men, women and children who died on October 1, 1884 in Rio de Janeiro.  These obits were reported by the Jornal do Comercio, on October 3.  The newspaper regularly printed lists of deaths in the city, collected from reports made by the public and private cemeteries in Rio. 

This map serves to showcase a neat new tool available on the web for spatial representation of nineteenth century data for Rio de Janeiro.  The tool was developed by a team headed by Zephyr Frank, who are part of the Stanford University Spatial History Lab.  They also collaborated with Cecult (UNICAMP) in Brazil.  It is available here.

Below, I've included a table with details about the 29 people who died on October 1, 1884.  The first column (“KEY”) refers to the numbers on the map.  There are more people in the table than points on the map because some people either died on locations outside of the map area or could not be located.

A single day creates an insufficient sample to say much about disease in this city.  We do see that this was not a period in which there was a major epidemic, such as yellow fever or smallpox. During the worst scourges, epidemic diseases killed more people than regularly occurring afflictions.  The top killer this day, tuberculosis was probably the most lethal disease in the nineteenth century.  There are no clusters or patterns that are immediately obvious.  I am surprised to see no deaths in the densely populated downtown area.  This may indicate that the newspaper was not reporting all deaths.