Canon PowerShot S100
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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 from 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 curve; perhaps these were not random deaths culled by god’s will, but a natural phenomena subject to study.

But note some of 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.

“The plague started in the East, possibly China, and quickly spread through Europe. Whole communities were wiped out and corpses littered the streets as there was no one left to bury them. Incubation took a mere four to six days and when the plague appeared in a household, the house was sealed, thus condemning the whole family to death. At night the corpses were brought out in answer to the cry, ‘Bring out your dead’, put in a cart and taken away to the plague pits.” — Historic UK

It’s hard to imagine those days.

Technology == progress.

(Jay Walker gave this print to me. An artifact like this can animate history as a touchstone for storytelling. Here’s another example from him, which I called the curation of symbolic immortality.)

13 responses to “A Bad Week in London in 1665…”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Jay’s library, with a backup Sputnik overhead
    Jay Walker Library Wired

    Reply
  2. clogwog Avatar
    clogwog

    frighted — 1 Grief — 2 oh nose.. Lethargy — 1

    Reply
  3. thepretenda Avatar
    thepretenda

    I think I have the Purples..

    Reply
  4. In Memoriam: jerryfi_99 Avatar
    In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

    Yeah…. that’s what my man cave will look like when done…… Amazing! I can see the Escher influence, with, maybe, a little Dr Who thrown in…. =8*o

    Reply
  5. gsikich1 Avatar
    gsikich1

    Impressive article via the link on the library photo – one could spend days, weeks, months in the library. I relish the thought.

    Reply
  6. the_other_ben Avatar
    the_other_ben

    I wonder what "Winde" is? It doesn’t show up in lists of archaic medical terms. Could be that they got hit by a tree or something blown over by wind, but that’s not as funny as dying of human wind…

    Reply
  7. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    See Gone with the Wind

    Reply
  8. RRNeal Avatar
    RRNeal

    Frankly the one vomiting behind the three with the winde did give a damn.

    Reply
  9. Kaets Ebut Avatar
    Kaets Ebut

    "Bring out your dead!"

    Reply
  10. Kaets Ebut Avatar
    Kaets Ebut

    > remember that the "f" without the horizontal line is a "s"

    That’s an insular "long s". It’s omnipresent Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and it survived until relatively recently–for example, in the Declaration of Independence. Here’s a brief examination:

    The Long and the Short of the Letter S

    Alas, it looked too much like the letter "f’", and language craves disambiguation.

    Reply
  11. the_other_ben Avatar
    the_other_ben

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Have you seen the new Flickr photo layout? I enabled it out of curiosity, and it appears to remove the ability to use Flickr as a blogging platform as you do. It no longer shows any images inline in the photo description or comments.

    The comment box is also now tiny; two and a half lines of text, about 35 characters wide.

    Reply
  12. Ed Suominen Avatar
    Ed Suominen

    I use the images as image sources on my blog and include the required link in the image captions. The images are also linked to my highest-res versions on Flickr. It works quite well. Here’s an example, my latest post with a bunch of images from my photostream: edsuom.blogspot.com/2013/10/vintage-valley.html

    By the way, Steve, I posted a copy of this awesome and amusing image on my Facebook timeline just now, per your CC license, with a link back here. Thanks.

    Reply
  13. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    And here is Jay’s talk presenting this artifact at TED MED.

    And a handy translation guide (I added the body count for our particular week in London in brackets):

    1. WINDE [3]
    Winde is listed throughout the Bills as a constant cause of death. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, winde referred to paroxysms of severe gastrointestinal pain, which could have been symptoms of numerous diseases.

    2. PURPLES [7]
    Purples described purple blotches on the skin caused by broken blood vessels, indicative of an underlying illness, such as scurvy or a circulation disorder. It could also mean the most severe stage of smallpox.

    3. LIVERGROWN [2]
    People who died of livergrown suffered from an enlarged (or failing) liver. Doctors could diagnose it through the combination of other symptoms, like jaundice and abdominal pain. It was commonly a result of alcoholism, but could be caused by a number of disorders.

    4. CHRISOMES [28]
    Infant mortality was extremely high before the advent of modern medicine. The Bills distinguished abortive (miscarried), stillborn, infant, and chrisom deaths—the latter term specified infants who died within the first month of life, around the time they were baptized with special white cloths (which were called chrisomes).

    5. RISING OF THE LIGHTS [16]
    Physicians and scholars have debated the origin of the term rising of the lights. According to the OED, the condition indicated any kind of illness characterized by a hoarse cough, difficulty breathing, or a choking sensation. Croup, asthma, pneumonia, and emphysema were all culprits.

    6. TIMPANY [0]
    The condition of having serious swelling or bloating in the digestive tract, which produces a hollow sound when tapped, is still called tympany today. The sort that would have proven fatal to humans could have been caused by kidney disease, intestinal infections, or cancerous tumors.

    7. TISSICK [6]
    The term tissick, a corruption of phthisis, originated in ancient Greek and persisted through Latin, French, and English for thousands of years, only to end up an obsolete word referring to a “wasting disease of the lungs,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. In the 17th century, that could indicate the wheezing and coughing associated with asthma, bronchitis, or possibly tuberculosis.

    8. MEAGROME OR MEGRIM [1]
    We recognize this obscurely spelled ailment as migraine. During the years of the Great Plague, any internal head trauma, from an aneurysm to a brain tumor, would be filed under megrim.

    9. IMPOSTHUME [10]
    Imposthume was a swelling, cyst, or abscess, usually filled with pus or other putrescence. At the same time that it was being recorded as a cause of death, imposthume took on a metaphorical meaning and referred to an egotistical or corrupt person “swollen” with pride.

    10. HEAD MOULD SHOT [0]
    In newborns, the bony plates of the skull are not fused together, which makes it easier to fit through the birth canal. Head mould shot described a condition where the cranial bones were so compressed by delivery that they overlapped (or overshot) each other and caused fatal pressure on the brain. Today, the condition, now known as craniosynostosis, is treatable with surgery.

    11. QUINSIE [1]
    Quinsie, which evolved from a Latin word meaning “choke,” is still occasionally used in modern England. It describes a complication of tonsillitis in which an abscess grows between the tonsil and the throat. Unless the abscess was removed, a patient could suffocate from the blockage.

    12. SURFEIT [69]
    A surfeit means an excess of something. In the Bills of Mortality, it’s hard to identify the substance in question. Sometimes, as in the case of King Henry I and his lampreys, it can refer to overeating a food that becomes poisonous if taken in large enough quantities. [booze perhaps?]

    13. FRENCH POX [0]
    When people across Europe came down with syphilis beginning in the 1490s, they blamed the French. (Perhaps they should have blamed Christopher Columbus and the Spanish, whom historians believe brought the bacterial infection back from the New World.) Rightly or wrongly, French pox is what the Bills of Mortality lists for deaths by advanced syphilis, whose symptoms included rash, blindness, organ failure, and tissue necrosis.

    14. BLOODY FLUX [2]
    Dysentery, a.k.a. bloody flux, was common among densely crowded Londoners without clean drinking water. People contracted dysentery from food or water contaminated with one of several pathogens, and its main symptom was bloody diarrhea (the aforementioned flux) and severe dehydration.

    15. PLANNET [0]
    Plannet is likely a shorthand for “planet-struck.” Many medical practitioners believed the planets influenced health and sanity [astrologists still do!]. A person who was planet-stricken had been suddenly maligned by the forces of particular planets. They would likely present symptoms also associated with aneurysms, strokes, and heart attacks.

    Reply

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