Cause of Death definitions - Weebine /Please read 'Decline" Concluded

[JSHC]

I was involved in checking/transcribing some of the OPR death for a FHS and decline was very very common.  I remember in one year (1843?) it seemed every death was either cholera or decline 

So that expereince was partly responsible for me guessing at the word.  Plus I was told to be very open to the possibility that I misread the first letter

[weste]

Decline definetly.  Could be that their health was declining, could be sudden or slow. Not necessarily elderly although quite often used in that respect.  I got a rels cert which says senile decay. You can say decay due to ageing process or it could be mental health alone.

[Canuc]

Physicians are mere mortals like the rest of us. Like the general population they like to be able to give a rational explanation, they don't like to be wrong and they don't like to look like fools and have trouble admitting that they don't know. At the time  being discussed "decline" would have been a good cover all for what they did not understand and/or could not treat. In that respect it should not be held against them, but a little humility wouldn't have been out of place.

We forget too that the use of sulphur drugs for infection only came into definite use during WWI. Penicillin went into commercial production in WWII which means the some significant step changes in infection control are sixty years old at most. As for imaging we had to wait for the computer for the biggest advances from the work of Madame Curie and Wilhelm Röntgen.

Until we had the vast improvements in rapid information sharing that began with the railway, supported by the telephone and then by television one would expect "decline" to be a common cause of death just as JSHC suggests. In a similar way "Ag Lab" frustratingly covered so many occupational sins in the same era.

Happy hunting
Canuc

[Abygail]

Thank you everyone for the input and interest in 'my' cause of death.    I agree that medicine has advanced to a level that would be thought unobtainable in the early 19th century.
Yes 'Decline' could be used to a multitude of ailments from failure to thrive to undiagnosed cancer.   There are so many illnesses that the general public are aware of today but weren't that well informed even 50 years let alone 180 years ago.
As I have already mentioned - Gilbert Robertson (1774 - 1839) spent all his adult life from approximately 1794 until his return to Scotland c1838 living in the West Indies where the mortality rate for Europeans was quiet high.  Yellow fever, cholera and dysentery just to name three.   
I'm only guessing here but I wouldn't be surprised that the main reason for his return to Scotland was because of his deteriorating health and he wanted to return to the country of his birth so he could be buried there.   The fact that he was an elderly man (65 at the time of his death) and the abolition of slavery by Britain had changed forever the way agriculture would be done in the West Indies.
Also, JSHC could you please tell me if the work you did was to go online of not?   I am starting to think I'm not going to find the record I had downloaded.   Unfortunately every so often the gremlins seem to gobble up the odd document for me. 
Abygail

[sallyyorks]

I notice his death date is during the 1830/40s s . There was widespread unemployment and  grain harvest failures across the British Isles  in the  1830s  wich caused famine allover the country  . As someone else commented on another thread on this site recently .
The  cause of death  'decline'   'decay' and 'dropsy'  in Parish records seems to be  for a whole range of ages in the ones iv seen . I sometimes wonder if these terms  were used for cases of malnutrition much more than we know  .