Epidémia bez konca. Čierny kašeľ vo farnosti Detva v 60. rokoch 19. storočia

JÁN GOLIAN
Katedra historických vied a stredoeurópskych štúdií, Filozofická fakulta, Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda v Trnave

An Unending Epidemic. Whooping cough in the parish of Detva in the 1860s

Abstract: The article deals with the occurence of whooping cough epidemics using the example of the parish of Detva in the 1860s. However, the problem is more complicated in that the disease appears in the church registers as a cough (tussis), not as a whooping cough (pertussis / tussis convulsiva). Therefore, it was repeatedly verified in the medical literature and sources of the time whenever these terms are correlated. I present how whooping cough is characterized, and how its epidemics manifested themselves in the past. Another part of the text is an analysis of register records, indicating cough, or whooping cough as the cause of death based on records of burials from the parish of Detva in today’s central Slovakia. Victims who perished of a „cough“ died in every year of the analyzed decade. That was also the main reason why I chose this period. My goal was to find out the basic demographic characteristics of the epidemics, such as the average age of the victims, the gender ratio and the proportion of deaths of cough victims to other deceased. Then I would calculate the crude death rate of whooping cough victims and analyzing the seasonality of epidemics. In addition, the research also follow the course of the infection in different parts of the parish, comparing the primary centre of the parish, i.e., the town of Detva, with the periphery of the region, which was made up of estates scattered in the hills.

Keywords: childhood epidemics, infectious diseases, whooping cough, history of medicine, parish of Detva, 1860’s.