The bills of mortality
London was already listing its dead every week. In 1662 someone read the list as a series.
The Ledger divides an annual total by the seconds in a year. That arithmetic is only possible because someone, much earlier, decided the dead could be written down in the same way every week, and because the paper survived.
London had the habit before it had the science. The parish clerks sent in the burials, the causes as the searchers understood them, and the city printed a weekly bill. Plague weeks were the reason it mattered. By the time anyone tried to learn from the pile, the pile was already old.
A citizen, and a pile of bills
In 1662 John Graunt, a citizen of London, published Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality. The title is doing the work. He did not found a statistical office. He sat with the bills and asked what a long run of them could say: how many people the city held, how the sexes compared, which causes returned every year, and what a plague year did to the ordinary count. The book was published under his name. A later argument has given parts of it to William Petty. The pages are what matter here. They are the first place a weekly list of the dead is treated as a series rather than as a calamity.
From a parish habit to a state form
A parish habit is not yet a national one. In 1749 the Swedish clergy began returning annual tables for the whole kingdom: population, births, deaths, and causes, parish by parish. That series, the Tabellverket, is one of the oldest continuous national population counts still readable. England's turn came later, and by statute. The Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1836 put registration in the hands of the state, and the registers opened in 1837. William Farr, in the Registrar-General's office, wrote up the causes. His letter of 6 May 1839 covers 141,607 deaths registered in England and Wales in the half-year ending 31 December 1837. A weekly city bill had become a form the state expected to receive.
The categories on those forms are the ancestors of the codes the Ledger still uses. A common list of causes, argued over at statistical congresses in the 1890s, was later taken into the World Health Organization. That handover is the subject of Not a register. The point of this piece is smaller. None of the counters exist unless someone once agreed to write the same fact down, in the same words, often enough that a total could be divided.
Sources
- Graunt's 1662 book, in the National Library of Medicine, printed in London by Tho. Roycroft.
- Tabellverket, the Swedish parish tables beginning in 1749, described by Umeå University.
- The Births and Deaths Registration Act 1836, under which registration in England and Wales opened in 1837.
- William Farr's letter of 6 May 1839, in the Registrar-General's first annual report, on 141,607 deaths registered in the half-year ending 31 December 1837.