Ways of Dying in 1665

[TheScarlettPimpernel]

So I'm just copying out a weekly Bill of Mortality from London, 1665 (don't ask!)

Look at some of the ways of dying - anyone care to hazard a guess at what some of them might be?!

Plague - 7165 (IN A WEEK!!!)
Childbed - 42 - just goes to show, it's all very well bemoaning medicalised childbirth/interventions/CSs but look at the alternative
Grief - 3 (Not bloody surprising - wonder what the actual medical cause was?)
Griping in the Guts - 51!
Rising of the Lights - 11 (WTF was that then? In offal, are the lights the lungs, right?)
Kingsevil - 2 (Don't ask me how I know this, but I believe this to be scrofula)
Wormes - 15 (OH EM GEE, you could die of worms )
Impostume - 11 (what?!)
Frighted - 3 (three people scared to death in a week )
Winde - 3 (Oh yeah. FARTED TO DEATH)

I realise I am a bit morbid

Maybe the fart deaths were due to standing too close to an open fire IYSWIM

Turnip I agree re. rising of the lights - if you've ever had asthma or a bad chest infection that is kind of what it feels like - as if your internals are kind of swelling and blocking your air passages.

Scouring/dysentery - having had dysentery, yar, that's quite convincing.

Here's more -

Tissick - spelt, of course, Tiffick - any ideas?
Stopping of the stomach - is that constipation possibly?

Flatbelly

Maybe that's really how the great fire started.

Scout that Old Bailey website is AMAZING!

Someone else likes reading these too. I think there are some death causes listed on that page which haven't been mentioned here yet..

tissick is cough according to this.

Oh wow, that website is brilliant!

Ooo Choux how interesting! I'm looking at a postcard which is a photocopy of the actual Bill itself, and they're different - no-one died of Purples in this one, for instance. Different week possibly, or different borough?

chrisome is death of a newborn - it's the name of a baby's shroud

Har har at calling 1665 the Medieval period [superior face]

Stopping of the stomach could be pyloric stenosis, my ds had that and needed surgery at 3 weeks old as the pipe to his stomach was too small.
If he had been born back then he would of died.

Yeah you can search by punishment, by sentence, by name, by crime, by town, is is hideously fascinating..

Ah, got it - my postcard is from September 1665, and the website is from January. Very interesting that the January one doesn't seem to list death by plague - yet by September, it was 7165 in A WEEK

Oh gosh your poor wee DS Monster - is he well now??

And that does sound a feasible explanation.

He is fine now thanks, he is 3 years old :)
Nowadays it is minor surgery under ga. :)

When calves get dysentry the farmer will refer to that as scours, or scouring, so that makes sense.

I'm having a duvet day to try and shake off a nasty cold but suddenly feeling quite lucky reading some of these...

Fascinating.

Aha, MN detective work at its best - Scouring = dysentery

In some ways this makes me regret Google - much more fun trying to work it out/dreaming up hideous 17th century ailments...

Really glad to hear it Monster :)

From Wikipedia - the plague arrive in London city in july 1665:
The dock areas outside of London, and the parish of St. Giles-in-the Fields where poor workers crowded into ill-kept structures, were the first areas struck by the plague. As records were not kept on the deaths of the very poor, the first recorded case was a Rebecca Andrews, on 12 April 1665. Another suspected source of the plague was cats and dogs, of which the Lord Mayor of London at the time had the majority exterminated.

By July 1665, plague was in the city of London itself.

Isn't plague always much worse in the summer anyway?

Can anyone explain surfeit to me, please? The glossaries I have found say 'Vomiting from over eating or gluttony'.
Given that we live in an age of obesity it seems strange that if this were the case, 1. people don't vomit from overeating much now and 2. no-one ever dies from it.
I mean, people die of overeating but through a rather less direct mechanism IYSWIM.

Yep plague rose up very quickly, and I think usually in the summer?

I tell you what else is interesting. At the bottom of the Bill of Mortality there is a sort of declaration as to what a loaf of bread should weigh! It's either a ration, I think (though why would it be rationed, unless because of the vast mortality rate from the Plague, supplies were scarce?) or an official weight/size to prevent people being short changed?

ANyway it reads thus:

The Assize of Bread set forth by the Order of the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, A penny Wheaten Loaf to contain Nine Ounces and a half, and three half-penny White Loaves the like weight.

it's an official weight to prevent short-changing I think, thought it could be that due to scarcity they shrunk the size of the official loaf.
I don't see how they could have done rationing in the WW2 sense.

Turnip I've always wondered that. And there was a King, wasn't there, who died of 'A surfeit of Lampreys', because the Thames was full of 'em. I wondered whether Lampreys in particular would be poisonous if you ate too many, but it looks like it's a general surfeit-related death...

Could surfeit actually have been food poisoning/salmonella?

Or alcoholic poisoning?

could food-poisoning have been misinterpreted as death from surfeit?