Thursday 19 – Friday 20 March 2026 | Barcelona, Spain
The accurate registration of deaths has long been a challenge for researchers. Crises, such as epidemics, often led to a systematic underestimation of the disease itself- either to downplay its spread or due to misclassification – while illnesses with similar symptoms were overreported. Likewise, long after the epidemic had passed, diseases with comparable symptoms could be mistaken for new epidemic outbreaks when they were not. Moreover, these kind of crises brought overwhelming workloads, administrative breakdowns, and, in many cases, the deaths of the very officials responsible for maintaining death records. In this sense, death certificates and other records provide crucial insights into mortality patterns, yet their reliability is often compromised by inconsistent reporting practices, evolving medical knowledge, the complex nature of causes-of-death and the social context.
This call for papers seeks contributions that explore the reliability of (historical) death registration, the handling of multiple causes of death, and the methodological challenges of working with such data within an epidemic context.
We invite submissions that engage with a range of questions, including but not limited to:
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How reliable were death registration practices during crises (such as the Black Death, cholera or yellow fever outbreaks, the 1918 influenza pandemic, or the HIV/AIDS crisis)?
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How were multiple causes of death recorded, and how should researchers interpret these records?
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What biases or gaps exist in historical registration systems, and how can they be addressed?
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What methodological approaches can improve our understanding of mortality (during crises)?
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What broader implications do historical findings have for contemporary registration practices?