Watch the Morgues

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• Watch the Morgues
• Susan J. Pearson (bio)

Stephen Berry, Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xviii + 119pp. Figures, graph, notes, and index. $21.95

In 2021, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study showing that more than half of all deaths that occur in police custody in the United States go unreported. Most states do not require that death certificates indicate whether a death occurred while in custody, and a 2014 federal law requiring law enforcement to report such deaths has generated no public data. Among the Black men who die at the hands of police, a New York Times investigation found that medical examiners and coroners sometimes listed the cause of death as “sickle cell traits” despite the fact that the deceased were attacked by police.¹ In the case of George Floyd, murdered by Minneapolis police, the county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. This was both exceptional and critical to the eventual indictment and conviction of officer Derek Chauvin.

Clearly, it matters how we record death. Knowing who dies and how they die enables a society to track everything from epidemic disease to structural inequality. In his new book, Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It, Stephen Berry helps historicize such grim accounting. Besides being the author of numerous books about the nineteenth-century United States, Berry is the creator of the digital history project CSI: Dixie, which gathers together and analyzes coroner’s inquests from South Carolina between 1800 and 1900. In both that project, and in Count the Dead (originally delivered as the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era at Penn State University), Berry is interested in “the dead as data” (p. ix). That is, he is interested not only in how we came to think of information about dead people as useful data but why. It matters, he argues, because counting the dead has led not only to improvements in public health, but also to improvements in Americans’ ability to reckon with the social and moral dimensions of death. When we know how many people die and how, we can assess whether their deaths have been just or fair.

Quantification and allied topics such as abstraction and standardization are quite hot among U.S. historians. Once largely the domain of historians [End Page 351] of science like Ted Porter, numbers and the things that people do with them have entered the mainstream. This is thanks in part to historians of statecraft and statebuilding who, following in the tradition of the anthropologists such as James Scott and Ann Laura Stoler, see counting, mapping, classification, and other such documentary projects as central to the modernizing projects of both empires and nation states. The long shadow of Michel Foucault looms large here, too, as Foucault’s emphasis on the nexus between knowledge and power put the human sciences and the state’s related efforts to count and classify its populations at the center rather than the margins of statecraft.²

So, too, interest in the history of capitalism has breathed new life into the study of how human activity becomes abstracted into data. Where Patricia Cline Cohen’s seminal work A Calculating People (1999) expertly documented American’s thirst for quantitative information in the early republic, recent historians have pushed that original insight in new directions, tying numeracy more firmly not only to capitalism but also to slavery. From documenting the birth of the insurance industry in the Atlantic imperial world to its imbrication in plantation slavery, from the abstraction of enslaved men and women into units of a “hand” and the perfection of plantation accounting practices, to the birth of weather and crop forecasting and the reduction of national progress to the GDP and the CPI, historians have put data at the dark heart of both slavery and capitalism.³

Yet for all the recent interest in the ways that states and markets have abstracted human life and human activity into quantifiable, fungible packets of information that greased the wheels of commerce and enabled a...