Manner of death
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In many legal jurisdictions, the manner of death is a determination, typically made by the coroner, medical examiner, police, or similar officials, and recorded as a vital statistic. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, a distinction is made between the cause of death (sometimes referred to as the "mechanism of death"), which is a specific disease or injury, versus manner of death, which is primarily a legal determination. Different categories are used in different jurisdictions, but manner of death determinations include everything from very broad categories like "natural" and "homicide" to specific manners like "traffic accident" or "gunshot wound". In some cases an autopsy is performed, either due to general legal requirements, because the medical cause of death is uncertain, upon the request of family members or guardians, or because the circumstances of death were suspicious.
International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes can be used to record manner and cause of death in a systematic way that makes it easy to compile statistics and more feasible to compare events across jurisdictions.
Natural causes
A death by natural causes, as recorded by coroners and on death certificates and associated documents, is one that is primarily attributed to natural agents: usually an illness or an internal malfunction of the body. For example, a person dying from complications from influenza (an infection) or a heart attack (an internal body malfunction) would be listed as having died of natural causes. Old age is not a scientifically recognized cause of death; there is always a more direct cause although it may be unknown in certain cases and could be one of a number of aging-associated diseases.
In contrast, death caused by active intervention is called unnatural death. The "unnatural" causes are usually given as accident (implying no unreasonable voluntary risk), misadventure (accident following a wilful and dangerous risk), suicide, or homicide. In some settings, other categories may be added. For example, a prison may track the deaths of inmates due to acute intoxication separately.
Unnatural death
Unnatural death is a category used by coroners and vital statistics specialists for classifying all human deaths not properly describable as death by natural causes. Hence it would include events such as:
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