Bills of Mortality
Life wasn’t easy in the seventeenth century East End of London. ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ may be a cliche but it accurately described existence in the Tower Hamlets of the 1800s and after. Infant mortality, arcane illnesses, early death and the risk of ending your life at the end of a rope were just some of the hazards.
The ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by the various parishes, were begun in the early 1600s. In this era of continual epidemics, they were intended as an early warning system, the local clerks logging where and when each death had occurred and posting the results on a weekly basis. One wonders what effective action a casual worker in Wapping, living from day to day just above the poverty line, could have taken to escape the cholera in his parish in any case. But what it does do is provide a fascinating picture of what ailed and killed those East Enders of a couple of centuries back.
The information is fine up to a point. The problem was that the people listing the information were not doctors but parish clerks, whose ‘diagnosis’ of what had seen the unfortunates off was vague at best. Certainly, the greatest number of deceased were simply ‘aged’ (though ‘age’ not being an illness nobody actually dies of it). Likewise, ‘bedridden’ and ‘lethargy’ are barely adequate as symptoms let alone diagnoses.
Medical science was far more primitive than today of course, and some illnesses cover a multitude of ailments today. ‘Ague’ for instance, was a condition of alternating hot and cold sweats with fever: sounding very much like modern-day malaria. ‘Quinsy’ was simply an infection caused by untreated tonsilitis, while ‘apoplexy’ (still used metaphorically today) would nowadays be diagnosed as a stroke. ‘Dropsy’ meanwhile, referred to a collection of lymphatic fluid (the modern-day oedema).
And some of the diseases had spectacular titles. St Anthony’s Fire would later be known as Ergotism and was a spectacularly nasty disease caused by fungal contamination of the grains used in baking. Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhoea, paralysis, itching, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hallucinations similar to those of an LSD trip … followed of course by death. In earlier times, the illness might even have been seen as evidence of demonic possession. ‘Rising of the Lights’ would be a disease of the lungs, with ‘Headmouldshot’ a catch-all for illnesses of the brain, such as encephalitis or meningitis.
Entertaining to read (though certainly not to suffer) are entries over the years that include bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s disease, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck. The latter again emphasises the persisting belief that Man’s moods and even sanity were at the mercy of the planets (moon struck would be a variation).
Sad too to see how mundane were many of the illnesses that saw people off. Until recently we’ve complacently thought of measles and chicken pox as childhood diseases to be overcome with a few days off school. But then (as in many parts of the world today) they were real killers. Colds would see off many (especially the young and old of course). The London of the 1700s was not a city of old people, and many of the young didn’t reach maturity. In the 1700s, around 150 or every thousand infants born failed to reach a year old - and things had barely improved a century later. The table below shows just how many mothers died in childbirth too.
LONDON BILL OF MORTALITY 1775
Natural deaths
Abortive and stillborn 529
Aged 1297
Ague 5
Apoplexy, suddenly & planet struck 215
Asthma & tissick 286
Bedridden 6
Bleeding 9
Blood flux 3
Bursten & rupture 9
Cancer 54
Canker 9
Childbed 188
Chicken pox 1
Cold 18
Colick & Twisted gut 70
Consumption 4452
Convulsions 5177
Cough, chin & whooping 206
Diabetes 2
Dropsie 865
Evil 11
Falling sickness 1
Fever, scarlet, purple spotted 2244
Fistula 9
Flux 9
French pox 71
Gout 69
Gravel, stones 36
Grief 3
Griping in the guts 1
Horseshoe head, head made hot, water on the head 19
Headache 2
Jaundice 120
Impostume 11
Inflammation 114
Itch 1
Leprosie 1
Lethargy 6
Livergrown 2
Lunatick 52
Measles 283
Miscarriage 4
Mortification 169
Palsie 65
Quinsie 4
Rash 1
Rheumatism 6
Rickets 1
Rising of the lights 1
Scald head 4
Sciatica 1
Scurvy 2
Sore throat 4
Smallpox 2699
Sores & ulcers 9
St Anthony’s fire 2
Stoppage in the stomach 10
Surfeit 1
Swelling 1
Teeth 694
Thrush 77
Tympany 1
Vapours 1
Vomiting & looseness 5
Worms 1
Non-natural causes
Bite - mad dog 2
Broken limbs -
Bruised 1
Burnt 8
Choked 1
Drowned 104
Excessive drinking 2
Executed 24
Fools etc 64
Found dead 2
Frighted 1
Frozen 1
Murdered 3
Overlaid 4
Poisoned 1
Scalded 1
Shot 1
Smothered 1
Stabbed 1
Starved 2
Suffocated 4
Suicide 29