Life, Death and Statistics: Civil Registration, Censuses and the Work of the General Register Office, 1836-1952 (review)

Given the abundance of historical demographic, epidemiologic, and health research that has been based on the data generated by the England and Wales General Register Office (GRO), a consolidated account of why and how these data came to be collected, analyzed, and published, and what were the impulses shaping the GRO's inception, growth, and development is long overdue. Eddy Higgs has provided us with a clear and detailed history of the GRO that, on the one hand, shifts the focus away from the historiographically dominant personalities of William Farr and T. H. C. Stevenson, and, on the other hand, is unfettered by the preoccupations of public health historians (and at £12.50, it is a real bargain!).

Having assiduously mined the Public Records Office, Higgs begins his chronological account with the genesis of the 1836 Registration and Marriage Acts. Readers new to Higgs's work may be surprised to learn that the foundation of the GRO was not a response solely to calls for a system of national medical statistics, nor to the need for a system of vital registration that served religious conformists and nonconformists alike: more crucial was the determination of property rights and titles, where the precise dating of marriage, birth, and death was essential. Higgs smartly notes that supposed deficiencies in the registration system that have been lamented by demographic and medical historians—the lack of penal compulsion to register vital events until 1874, the nonregistration of stillbirths until the twentieth century, and the lack of information on morbidity—are perfectly understandable when the original purpose of that system was an institutional structure for the reliable transference of material assets.

Irrespective of the various reasons behind the founding of the GRO, it was the insertion of a clause into the Parliamentary Bill requiring the registration of cause of death that ensured the Office's role at the center of public health policy debates and that has captured the subsequent attention of medical historians. Much of the book is concerned with the statistical role that the GRO played in the modern British state up to the mid-twentieth century: the limitations of the information collected; the interaction of technology, data manipulation, and policy implications; and the deployment of demographic and epidemiologic arguments in public health, eugenic, and other debates. Along the way, Higgs reevaluates the contributions of some of the key figures in the GRO's history. Registrar-general from 1842 to 1879, Major George Graham emerges from William Farr's shadow not as the weak and dull administrator portrayed by others, but as a "determined, fiery character, almost to the point of recklessness" (p. 68). Graham's qualities provide a stark contrast to the limitations of his successor, Sir Brydges Henniker, who shoulders a large portion of the blame for the GRO's inertia toward the end of the nineteenth century. While key individuals emerge as important influences on the direction and strength of the GRO, Higgs is also careful to draw out its vulnerability to other forces of government, and not only the Treasury: successively, the Local Government Board and the Ministry of Health mediated the GRO's independent voice. Further, the GRO's epidemiologic output was demoted by the Ministry in favor of the Medical Research Council; and not long after the Second World War, more than half of the GRO's staff were directly involved in running the National Health Service Central Register.

In his introductory remarks, Higgs is defensive almost to the point of apology about the type of historical practice contained in the book—namely, a reasonably straightforward, descriptive institutional history that eschews abstract theorizing. That he felt the need to make such remarks perhaps reflects unfavorably on the discipline. Yet Higgs's "traditional" institutional history is underpinned by a key message that...