ABSTRACT
Occupation has been routinely recorded in England and Wales on death certificates and in the decennial Censuses since the mid 19th century. This was through the influence of medical statisticians such as William Farr (1864); these innovators viewed disease as a consequence to a greater or lesser extent of the social circumstances of the patient, which would, in turn, be an indication of the sum of the environmental experience that an individual had had up to the onset of the disease. Occupations were recorded in a fairly arbitrary fashion until the Census of 1911, when Stevenson, the Chief Medical Statistician, and successor of William Farr, introduced the concept that an ordinal measure of lifestyle could be devised. He termed this the social class scale and based it entirely on the occupation as recorded in the enumerators’ returns for the Census. The original scale had five sub-divisions: https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
I
Professional
II
Intermediate
III
Skilled
IV
Semi-skilled
V
Unskilled
