We all complain about the terrible state of healthcare in modern times, but medicine has gone a long way towards saving people from preventable and treatable diseases. Take, for example, this gruesome chart above listing the deaths due to the diseases and other reasons in 1632, London.
The data was compiled from bills of mortality, a weekly death statistics produced by several parishes of the City of London during the outbreaks of plague in 1592 to 1595 and then continuously from 1603.
Some definitions:
- Affrighted = stress-induced heart attack
- Ague = fever with periods of shivering and sweats (like malaria)
- Apoplex = stroke and aneurysm, Meagrom = migraine or severe headache
- Bit with a mad dog = rabies
- Bloody flux, scouring and flux = dysentery
- Cancer and wolf = malignant tumor
- Childbed = infection after childbirth
- Chrisomes, and infants = babies less than a month old
- Colick, stone, and strangury = abdominal pain and painful urination
- Consumption = tuberculosis
- Cut of the stone = surgery to remove bladder or kidney stones
- Dropsie and swelling = edema or swelling of a body part
- Falling sickness = epilepsy and seizures
- Flocks and small pox = smallpox
- Fistula = abnormal connection of two body parts
- French pox = syphilis
- Jaundies = jaundice or yellowing of the skin due to liver failure
- Jawfaln = “jaw fallen” or lockjaw, tetanus
- Impostume = abscess
- King’s evil = scrofula, where tuberculosis bacteria infects the lymph nodes in the neck
- Livergrown = rickets, caused by vitamin D deficiency
- Lunatique = mental illness
- Made away themselves = suicide
- Over-laid = infant smothered when a parent rolled onto them while sleeping, Starved at nurse = insufficient breast milk
- Palsie = paralysis
- Piles = hemorrhoids
- Planet = “planet-struck” or a sudden and severe paralysis, thought to be due to the forces of particular planets
- Pleurisie = swollen and inflamed tissue that surrounds the lungs
- Purples = bruising, Spotted feaver = typhus
- Quinsie = inflamed tonsils
- Rising of the lights = severe coughing. “Lights” are “lungs,” named so because they are light-weight organs.
- Surfet = overeating
- Teeth = babies that have not yet gone through teething
- Thrush = yeast infection
- Tympany = cancer in the abdomen
- Tissick = cough