DOI: 10.17863/cam.109960.2
title: Historic cause of death coding and classification scheme for individual-level causes of death - Manual

description: ICD10h2024.2 (this version, published June 2025) incorporates the following changes: - Manual: new preface to list changes to files; changes relating to code changes; a small number of other corrections and improvements. - Masterlist (see 2025MasterlistChanges): 9 new codes added, 5 codes deleted, and 17 changes made to ICD10 or ICD10h descriptions. - Transferfile (see 2025TransferfileChanges): 47 errors were fixed. - InfantCat (see 2025InfantCatChanges): 17 ICD10h codes were updated. - Historic Strings English (see 2025HistoricStringsEnglishChanges): 14 changes were made to ICD10h or ICD10hInjury codes were made. ICD10hDescription and ICD10hInjuryDescription columns were deleted. This file contains manual for ICD10h: a historic cause of death coding and classification scheme for individual-level causes of death. ICD10h has been designed by the authors to aid the coding and classification of causes of death recorded on historic individual death records. Input data for the scheme consisted of mortality records for Scottish town of Kilmarnock and Isle of Skye (derived from the project Determining the Demography of Victorian Scotland Through Record Linkage, ESRC RES-000-23-0128 held at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge), and the island of Tasmania (P. Gunn and R. Kippen, ‘Household and Family Formation in Nineteenth-Century Tasmania, Dataset of 195 Thousand Births, 93 Thousand Deaths and 51 Thousand Marriages Registered in Tasmania, 1838-1899’, 2008) for the late 19th century. Although ICD10h contains exemplar causes of death based on these datasets, it does not contain any information about any deceased person apart from cause of death, and does not provide counts of deaths from particular causes. The data were hand-coded and subject to stringent algorithm-assisted tests. The ICD10h system is based on the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases - 2016 version (ICD10 - 2016), and combines ICD10 codes (without modification) with new codes for archaic/historic terms. A general historical classification of deaths, HistCat, is also provided, as well as a historical classification for infant deaths, InfantCat. The manual presents the background to the development of the system, and explains how to use the system for the coding and classification of causes in both English and other languages. It is associated with additional datasets (available in both .xlsx and .csv) containing 1) the lists of codes and their descriptions which constitute the coding and classification system, together with the HistCat classification [https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.109961.2]; 2) a set of exemplar historic strings in the English language [https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.109962.2]; and 3) the classification for infant deaths [https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.109963.2]. ICD10h has been developed in association with the following research projects: Digitising Scotland/Scottish Health Informatics Project (funded by the ESRC); Studying Health in Port Cities (funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research); the Great Leap (funded by COST-Action CA22116). Please note that ICD10h is a research tool created to facilitate the study of historical cause of death records and should not be used for any official purpose. It is based on the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) version 2016 (Geneva: World Health Organization 2016) but is not a recognised version or extension of ICD-10 and is not authorised by WHO. However we have consulted with WHO: they recognise that ICD10h is a useful academic methodology and have not raised any objections to its creation. Data coded using ICD10h are not directly comparable with data coded in ICD-10, and the underlying or primary cause of death derived using the ICD10h methodology may be different from the underlying cause derived in ICD-10 according to the WHO rules. Please note that ICD-10 version 2016 is not the most recent version of ICD-10; and that WHO now recommend the use of ICD-11; a more advanced and detailed classification.