Farr recognized that these surveys could be far more valuable to science if they included additional variables. He waged a long campaign to persuade physicians and surgeons to report a cause of death wherever possible, drawing upon a list of twenty-seven fatal diseases. By the mid-1840s, his reports tallied deaths not only by disease, but also by parish, age, and occupation. For the first time, doctors and scientists and health authorities had a reliable vantage point from which to survey the broad patterns of disease in British society.
