過去帳による地域集団の健康水準の評価

抄録

When public health researchers and practitioners want to estimate the health level in the past time more than half century ago, they are usually confused by the deficiency of statistical data, especially in a small community. Nevertheless, health needs in the small community have become recently the most important administrative problem, so that the authors have concerned with health estimation in the small community . The utilization of necrology is also conducted on this research program. About 7, 000 deceased cases are collected out of the necrologies in five temples during 115 years, 1862-1982, at Mitoh-cho, Yamaguchi Prefecture. While description of mortal age is necessary for estimation of health level, the mortal age is not always described at the deceased in every necrologies. Cases with mortal age are counted up to 80.1% in male and 79.2% in female in the necrologies which the authors have inspected . Some very young cases without the mortal age are also identificated their deceased age in terms of the posthumous Buddhist name in which infants and toddlers are given specific name of "gaiji" or "gaijyo" to boys or girls respectively. Sex identification also are perfectly reliable by the posthumous Buddhist names.1) The authors counted at first the deceased by year, and at next step the deceased by sex and age, after that they showed patterns of the deceased number in each category in both of tables and graphs. The surveyed year are broken down into 4 intervals: 1868-1910 (I), 1911-1935 (II), 1936-1955 (III), 1956-1982 (IV) according to both of histological aspects and Patterns of incidence.2) The rate of the younger death less than 10 years old is decreasing in accordance with the intervals.3) Sex ratio (male/female) is so high in the II intervals that World War II influenced more strongly to male than female.4) When the average deceased age observed are compared with Japanese life span, there are no discrepancy between them until the II interval, nevertheless the former is lower than the latter after the War.5) while the young adult generation decreased in rural areas for the sake of migration which is caused by industrialization and non-agriculturalization throughout Japan, there is a lower average of mortal age in this community, so that the authors suspect that this community's health level is somewhat lower than the Japanese average of health level. The authors would argue that necrology is available as to estimation of health level in the small community.