I can’t be the only history geek that spends way too much of her time reading Bills of Mortality. When you’re researching a book that involves a lot of different diseases (and I’m on my third book of that kind), you tend to come across them frequently. And they’re pretty fascinating.

The custom of recording deaths is an ancient one. The Romans kept registries in their temples, and in medieval times, registries seem to have been kept from at least the fourteenth century in many European countries. Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell (the star of Hilary Mantel’s incredible Bring Up the Bodies), ordered registries to be kept in every parish starting in 1538.

But John Graunt (1620 – 1672) wins the prize for death-and-disease record-keeping. He was the Freakonomics genius of the seventeenth century.

He was a prosperous merchant who lost everything in the Great Fire of London of 1666. Four years before the fire, he published a short book called Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills of Mortality, where he summed up his observations from years of cataloguing the patterns of illnesses and deaths. (You can, amazingly, read his scanned book here.)

Graunt counted and organized people by gender, age, religion, occupation, rank, how and where they died, and what sickened them. Here are some of Graunt’s cause-of-death categories:

cancer

dog bytes

drowning

plague

fryght

childbirth

fever

head-mould

rupture

scurvy

spotted feaver

stone

stopping of the stomach

stangury

teeth

ulcer

wormes

French pox (syphilis)

small pox

burnt in his bed

I think “stangury” might be kidney stones. Surgery for the stone was very dangerous–surgery for anything was very dangerous. Even if patients managed to survive the surgery itself, they usually died soon after from shock or sepsis. Note the incidence of death from “dog bytes.” I don’t know if this means rabies, or just getting mauled by packs of roving dogs. Both were certainly a danger in many cities. I blogged here about walking sticks and canes and why otherwise able-bodied gentlemen took to carrying them. Good for thwacking away mad dogs.

One of these days I plan to research head-mould…