Graunt’s Table of Casualties
July 30, 2003 | Claiborne Booker
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A quick question about the Table of Casualties on page 19 of “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”: data are presented from 1629 to 1636 and from 1647 to 1660. What about 1637 to 1646, or am I missing something?
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Here’s what I can find in the first edition of John Graunt, National and Political Observations mentioned in a following index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality. With reference to the Government, Religion, Trade, Growth, Ayre, Diseases, and the several Changes of the said City (London, 1662).
Several other tables contain some data for the missing years, with breakouts by gender and geographic unit. Lacking in these tables are details about the causes of death, other than the plague.
Graunt concludes his set of tables with these notes:
And what is the meaning of the statement “That the 10 years between 1636 and 1647 are omitted as containing nothing Extraordinary, and as not consistent with the Incapacity of a Sheet”? Was the foldout page used for printing the table too small to show the 10 missing years?!
Thanks to our Kindly Contributor Claiborne Booker (who also provided good advice, which I followed, about visiting Santa Fe last week).
The data from the London Bills of Mortality are famous for
inducing errors in their users. For a graphic example see:
A Small Hurrah for the Black Death. Chance,15(4), 58-60, 2002.
that shows (i) how Arbuthnot erroneously copied one number
(1704) in his 1710 article using the data to prove the existence of
God, and (ii) his missing the error strongly suggests he could
never have graphed them. From this we conclude that graphs
were not yet invented (or at least not widely known).
That article has the complete correct data string.