17th-Century Londoners Died of Fright, Itch and Grief

London in the 1600s was a crowded, disease-ridden city where residents succumbed to plague,
tuberculosis and other urban pestilences. They also apparently died of lethargy, fear and sadness,
if the 17th-century statistician John Graunt is to be believed.
John Graunt
Detail from John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality,
which compiled causes of death in 17th-century London. (Credit: Royal Society)
Life was hard for 17th-century Londonersand death came both often and mysteriously. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in John Graunts Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the
Bills of Mortality, a groundbreaking vital statistics text that helped launch modern demography. A
1679 edition of the treatise went on display at Londons Royal Society on Monday as part of an
exhibition celebrating 350 years of scientic book collecting.

Born in 1620, John Graunt worked as a haberdasher, held a series of municipal position and
served in the London militia. In the mid-1600s he began aggregating and analyzing the citys
weekly death lists, known as bills of mortality, and in 1662 he published the rst edition of Natural
and Political Observations. In the landmark report, Graunt calculated death rates, identied
variations by subset and pioneered the use of life tables, which show predicted mortality for each
age group. He observed, among other things, that women lived longer than men and that more
than one-third of Londons children never made it past the age of 6.

The book came about because Graunt realized that the data being collected in parishes in and
around London was open to analysis and interpretation by the new class of natural philosophers,
or scientists, who, amongst other things, had founded the Royal Society in 1660, explained Keith
Moore, head of library and archives at the Royal Society. Bills of mortality didnt normally tell you
things like age at death, which we would take for granted as being important. This kind of absence
of information is very interesting and shows the problems that Graunt had to grapple with.

Graunt also included commentary on daily life in a teeming urban center that was quickly
outgrowing its medieval infrastructure, noting, The old Streets are unt for the present frequency
of Coaches. He speculated that overpopulation and squalid conditions accounted for Londoners
mediocre health and frequent bouts with plague, foreshadowing the work of early epidemiologists.
London, the Metropolis of England, is perhaps a Head too big for the Body, and possibly too
strong, Graunt wrote.

Todays city dwellers can surely relate to trafc woes and overcrowding, but the books foldout
mortality tables might take modern readers by surprise. Covering several decades of the
mid-1600s, Graunt includes tallies for causes of death ranging from execution and accidents to
scurvy, measles and the inscrutable stopping of the stomach. The highest numbers represent the
heavy hitters of the era, including plague, which killed 10,400 during a 1636 outbreak, and
tuberculosis, which claimed almost 30,000 lives between 1647 and 1657a staggering gure
given Londons population at the time, estimated around 350,000. A malady described as teeth
and worms took another signicant toll, carrying off 14,236 inhabitants over a 20-year period.

Other purported causes point to the limited medical knowledgeor, perhaps, the acute sensitivity
and terrible luckof 17th-century Londoners. Each year, for instance, several residents apparently
died of lethargy, another dozen or so expired from grief and between two and 20 were lost to
lunatick. A single fatality from itch took place in 1648, while in 1660 nine people perished after
being frighted. Between 1629 and 1632, 27 deaths occurred when hapless souls fainted in a
bath, and in 1630 alone 24 people were smothered and stied. Interestingly, at a time when even
children drank beer, excessive drinking was the culprit in just two deaths.

Graunt himself succumbed to jaundice and liver disease in 1674 at age 53. By that time, his
conversion to Catholicism had cast him out of favor and plunged him into bankruptcy; according to
some reports, Londoners suspected him of deliberately turning off the water supply as the Great
Fire of 1666 consumed the city. Two centuries would go by before another inuential statistician,
William Farr, established a system for routinely recording mortality data in the United Kingdom.

The Royal Society exhibition, which runs until June, includes other rare publications from the
fellowships archives, some of which have never appeared in public before. Examples include the
rst edition of Charles Darwins Origin of Species and Isaac Newtons handwritten corrections to
Principia. This year sees the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society Library, said Moore. The
rst book was presented in 1661. We wanted to celebrate this event by showing some of our book
treasures and not just the very great books that everyone knows, but also some lesser-known,
important works in our history.

By Jennie Cohen, www.history.com (5/12-2011)