[Classification of causes of death in humans]

The cause of death of 2631 deceased persons (2418 adults, 213 children) was determined. Classification is proposed by monocausative, relatively monocausative, competitive and complex causes of death. This classification would be in accordance with types of dying, as suggested by Thieke and Nizze [17]. A comparison of results has revealed far-reaching agreement between the two principles of classification with regard to frequency distribution of causes, except for the category of complex causes which, however, was of minor importance in our investigations. This was attributed to the fact that classification was facilitated by consideration of epistemological approaches. Differences among categories of causes were attributable also to age and sex of the cases studied, both adults and children.