William Farr and national vital statistics

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales began under a new General Register Office in 1837. The office had death returns from the whole country and no sound way to name what people had died of. The classification in public use was William Cullen's, and it had not kept pace with medicine.

William Farr, born in 1807 in the Shropshire village of Kenley to parents of humble means, was raised by a local benefactor, Joseph Pryce, whose bequest paid for medical study in Paris from 1829. He joined the Register Office in 1839 as its first medical statistician. In his letter for the Registrar General's first annual report he complained that one disease might go by three or four names and one name cover several diseases, and he argued that a uniform nomenclature mattered as much to his field as weights and measures did to physics.

Farr wrote such letters on the causes of death for the annual reports over the next four decades. He framed a statistical nosology that sorted deaths into classes, with epidemic, endemic and contagious diseases first, and as an assistant census commissioner he wrote almost all of the census reports for 1851, 1861 and 1871.

His system went abroad. The first International Statistical Congress, at Brussels in 1853, asked Farr and Marc d'Espine of Geneva to draw up a uniform classification of causes of death. They brought two different lists to Paris in 1855, Farr's arranged in five groups (epidemic, constitutional, local, developmental and violent), and the congress adopted a compromise of 139 headings. A revision in 1864 followed Farr's model, and further revisions led to the International Classification of Diseases now kept by the WHO.

Passed over for the post of Registrar General, Farr retired on 1 February 1880. He died on 14 April 1883.