ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disciplinary Perspectives on the London Bills of Mortality, 1518–1858

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The London Bills of Mortality are a long-lived historical data series that form a vital body of evidence for the historical study of medicine, public health, demography, risk management, data science, and mathematics in 16th- through 19th-century Britain. Over the centuries, they developed into a combination of weekly and annual mortality reports that provided contemporaries—and later scholars—with quantitative information on how many people were dying of plague and other causes of death in each of the city’s parishes. The complex process developed to generate this data drew on community members who reported deaths, female “searchers” appointed to examine the dead, coroners who pronounced judgement on accidents and murders, parish clerks who transformed individualized information into counts, and the parish clerks’ guild, which gradually became responsible not just for compiling the data but for printing and disseminating the public bills. The numbers from the bills were then summed, summarized, analyzed, and used both for the immediate task of safeguarding health as well as to study the epidemiological, ecological, social, and infrastructural landscape of the city.

This session will synthesize knowledge from multiple perspectives to explore the complex histories and legacies of London’s bills of mortality. Jessica Otis focuses on the evolution of the bills and the evidence they provide of early modern numeracy and numerical practices in Londoners’ everyday lives. Craig Spence examines the searchers of the dead and the processes of categorizing causes of death, which fixed and formalized knowledge about individual deaths. Stephen Greenberg takes a history of the book approach, exploring how the material realities of printing influenced the production of the bills. Lastly, Kristin Heitman considers how Londoners’ lived experiences of plague outbreaks shaped how they perceived and used the data provided by the bills.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Deborah Kent, University of St Andrews

Individual Presentations

• The Myriad Forms and Sums of the London Bills of Mortals - Jessica Otis, George Mason University

• Constructing ‘murder’ in early eighteenth-century London: The Searchers, the Bills, and the language of violent death - Craig Spence

• The Visitation Revisited: Plague Pamphlet Publication and Distribution in 17th Century Britain - Stephen Greenberg, Independent Scholar

• Using Counts in Context: The Bills of Mortality and Lived Experience - Kristin Heitman, Independent Scholar

Session Organizer

• Jessica Otis, George Mason University