History

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Plague History

John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations mentioned in a
following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1676), p. 46.

The figures given by the first great English demographer, John Graunt, in Worth’s copy of his seminal work on bills of mortality, demonstrate that plague was endemic in England in the early modern period. It was, however, the Great Plague of 1665 which undoubtedly held contemporary attention for, as the following table makes clear, it was during that fateful year that plague ravaged London, killing no less than 68,596 people according to the following Bill of Mortality.

Table comparing 1665 plague deaths in London with others in earlier years.

As Greenberg (1997 and 2004) has demonstrated, such specific figures are available because of the government policy of public health awareness: by encouraging printers to publish these statistics showing the spread and virulence of the infection throughout London the government hoped to educate the public about the extent of the threat, while at the same time enabling trade to continue despite the plague.

The bills of mortality which Graunt studied and which were later collected by Worth come with at least one proviso, however. Such figures are the result of individual parish reporting of deaths which in turn was deputised to ‘searchers’, frequently old women and uneducated people who were likely to label any unusual death as ‘plague’, that great catchall disease. Yet if the searchers might unconsciously exaggerate the numbers of deaths from plague it is equally likely that individual families might try to hide plague deaths, aware that seventeenth-century English government policy advocated the shutting up of homes (with the household inside), once a plague death had been found. The numbers from the bills of mortality then should act as guidelines, not exact renditions of exactly how many people died from plague in London during this period. But if there are caveats concerning the numbers involved it is equally clear that the bills drawn up by Graunt and Sir William Petty provided vital information about the social implications of the disease.

As the work of Paul Slack (1990) has amply demonstrated, plague in London tended to start in the poorer parishes, where living conditions exacerbated the problem. While plague respected no man it is clear that the poor were always the worst affected in any epidemic, whether in England or the rest of Europe: unlike the rich, they couldn’t flee to the country and once infected had little resources with which to fight the disease. The bills not only highlight the social impact of plague in this way but also draw our attention to its seasonal impact: plague was always worse in the summer months. This is commented on in another work in Worth’s collection, John Pechey’s Collections of acute diseases, in five parts (London, 1691):

John Pechey’s Collections of acute diseases, in five parts (London, 1691), pt. 2, pp 1-2.

The reason for this was primarily because the heat of the summer enabled rat fleas to generate, while colder conditions were not conducive to them. This suggests, in turn, that the form of bubonic plague affecting England in the seventeenth century was, as Paul Slack has argued, bubonic plague. For more on the debate about the causes of early modern plagues, see the Causes webpage.

Plague in London: Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

Worth’s interest in the 1665 plague in London was fuelled by two factors: the 1720 Marseilles plague fuelled a plague scare in England and printers rushed to published not only works by contemporary early eighteenth-century physicians such as Richard Mead, but also released new editions of works on the last great English plague of 1665. By far the most important English writer on the 1665 plague was the physician Nathaniel Hodges (1629-1688), who had stayed in London during the plague and had later written up his enduring analysis of the course, symptoms and cure of that plague. Worth collected the first edition of Loimologia (London, 1672) but the work was considered of such vital importance that it was one of those texts reprinted in translation in 1720 in the wake of the threat from Marseilles. Its enduring popularity owed much not only to Hodges’ style but also to the empirical basis of his work: he was not afraid to discount Galen when his own experience taught him otherwise.

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