List of causes of Death from 1632

[Peteryougit]

I find this sort of thing really interesting. I’m sorry, I don’t have a direct link so I don’t know which region it’s from - l hope the photo attached okay.

”Rising of the lights” - any ideas?

11 people died of grief

Wolf (in this context) is another term for cancer or a cancerous growth, hence "wolf and cancer" being together. None of the groupings are random.

Thanks Dog

will have to google some of the others.

Dying of sciatica sounds horrendous.

The number of cancer deaths is very low. Clearly no post-mortems in those days or perhaps everybody’s putrid teeth saw them off beforehand at an earlier age

wolf probably means just that?

I think wolf=lupus which can be associated with skin eruptions. I imagine cancer (the crab) would have only been diagnosed back then by seeing a visible tumour, so it makes sense that the two would be associated.

I remember a similar list in a GCSE history textbook, but it can’t have been the same one, as one person died from “sore legge”.

I’m wondering if “bloody flux, scowring and flux” is bloody diarrhoea and/or vomiting. Cholera, perhaps?

'Several accidents' - the 'several' can be read as 'various', so meaning they died of various accidental causes.

This is absolutely fascinating!

Probably cholera or dysentery, or maybe what we now know as Crohn's or UC.

French Pox was syphilis, interestingly the French called it the Italian disease, while in Poland it was known as the German disease!

Do you think purples and spotted fever is meningitis?

'Killed by several accidents' makes me think of Stupid Deaths on Horrible Histories 😄

Interestingly, a term still used today related to "stone" (which PPs have already mentioned refers to bladder stones) is the lithotomy position - on your back, legs up - which still used for a number of procedures, particularly gynae. Litho means stone, otomy is cutting, so it's the position for surgical stone cutting historically ie bladder stone removal. A useless thing I remember being told as a third year medical student many moons ago!

I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t help picturing a succession of calamities, Mr Bean style.

It's nice to be a...

I could imagine that at the time ‘several‘ had the meaning of ‘various kinds of’, so it just refers to ‘anyone who died from one accidental cause or another’. Rather than to particularly unlucky Mr. Bean-like figures who had a succession of slapstick accidents.

Dead in the street and starved😥

@Cattenberg That’ll teach me to read to the end of all the posts - I didn’t intentionally nick your Mr Bean reference! Great minds etc etc.

I'm enjoying "Lunatique" maybe someone ate their naice ham and they lost the plot?

"Agues" is malaria- which was endemic in Britain until the industrial revolution. (Albeit a milder form than what we'd associate with the disease presentation today).

That’s what i was thinking

Some of them are explained here:
blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscripts/2016/07/25/billsofmortality/

www.bigissue.com/culture/books/evil-or-planet-struck-how-the-curious-ways-we-described-deaths-in-the-past-shaped-how-we-live-now/

Relatively few died because they were 'aged'