A Bad Week in London in 1665
Taking a page from Jay Walker’s library. As a curator of artifacts, he loves the stories.
The birth certificate, and the death certificate, were an invention of the London tax authorities. They were tired of taking the census to set the tax rate and encountering ghost towns that heard word that “the tax man cometh” and took off for a week in the countryside. With the certificates, they demanded proof of lost souls, versus those who are “not quite dead yet.”
Well, they also kept records of the causes of death, and compiled the weekly bill of mortality. There are some amazing details. But first, realize that this is from the first compilation of heath statistics. And it’s the year of the plague, in a city of 500K people. From January to April 1665, the plague was zero, but as the weather warmed and the fleas jumped form the rats, 17 died from the plague at the end of May; next week 43, then 112, 470, 725, 1843. Peaking around 1000 deaths per day, it then drops in a similar curve, and for the first time, they recognized a normal-shaped curve; perhaps these were not random deaths culled by god’s will, but a natural phenomena subject to study.
But the little things… (In reading it, remember that the “f” without the horizontal line is a “s”)
2 died by stone. Bad teeth took 138. A scattering of small pox, spotted fever and rickets. But the plague – 6,988 this week. That’s a thousand people per day to take off to burn. Perhaps they miss a few, and so you see 25 diagnosed of having died by worms.
It’s hard to imagine those days.
Technology == progress.
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