SOME 18th CENTURY MORTALITY & DISEASE STATISTICS
FOR LONDON

1. Bills of Mortality from the Gentleman's Magazine

The following figures are from the monthly bills of mortality reported in the Gentleman's Magazine of the period. What we do not have are accurate figures for the population or for the numbers of people in each age group. It is known that for long periods London grew more by an influx of people from the rest of the country than from increased numbers of births. The number of burials is frequently higher than the number of baptisms as shown in Table 2 below. For example in 1735, the number of baptisms was 16,691 and the burials 23,707. Any one year is not necessarily typical of the period as mortality was influenced by the weather, by harvests and by epidemics. A broader view some information on baptisms and burials is shown from five year periods as shown in table 2.

The one area where we have an idea of the population is for infants. If we were to take the baptisms as a measure of births, the population under the age of 2 must have been approximately 33,382 in 1735. There were 9,720 deaths of children under 2, which was 29% of those born. There is no information to show deaths of children under the age of 1, which is the usual measure of infant mortality.

In the 1840s, cities such as Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Ashton and Stockport had infant mortality rates between 25 and 29% of live births and the average for the whole country was 16%. The information from the Registrar General allows us to look at the death rate for those under the age of 2. For example, for males in Lancashire, the county with the highest death rates, 26.8% of children died in the first year of life and 10.8% of the remainder died in their second year of life. Thus, the survivors at age two were 65.3% of those born or loss of 34.7%. If one were to look at males in Cheshire the corresponding figures show a loss of 22.3% in the first year and an additional 7% of the remainder in the following year to give a total loss of 27.7% over a two year period. These figures are very similar to those for London figures on 1735.

Table 1. Deaths in London in Various Age Groups as a Percentage of Total Deaths for the year

After this initial view a wider range of years was examined to obtain an average from a bigger sample size. I have not attempted a proper statistical study but the data appears to show little overall change in the pattern of deaths. The fall in the proportion of deaths under 2 between the 1730s and 1760s is probably not significant as the average number of baptisms in the two period were 16,500 per annum for 1735-8 but only 15,641 for the period 1760-1764 leading to about 1700 fewer children under the age of 2. 

Table 2. Deaths in London in Various Age Groups as a Percentage of Total Deaths for the year
Averaged over two periods

Table 3. Baptisms and Burials in London for two five year periods: 1735-1739 and 1760-1764 inclusive

Although these two sets of figures relate to periods 25 years apart, the numbers of baptisms and burials are remarkably consistent. The figures relate to the parishes within the city walls of London and there would be high population movement between this and adjacent districts as well as migration from other parts of the country.

Table 4. Causes of Death in London in 1735

See Glossary of Old Medical Terms for details of causes

To look at the variance in the data I examined the figures for two periods in the 1730s and in the 1760s. While there is some fluctuation in the figures from year to year there does not appear to be a marked change over the period in the distribution between the main categories. It is not possible to know from this data if the diagnoses of common diseases changed. In the 1730s there appear to be rather more diagnoses of "teeth", assumed to be mainly children contracting infections at the time of weaning.

Table 5. Summary of main causes of death 1735-1738 & 1760-1764

At this period, and indeed for the next century, diagnosis of the causes of death was very primitive. The terms pneumonia, typhus and typhoid were unknown and they do not appear in Dr. Johnson's dictionary of 1755. Typhus was variously called jail fever, camp fever, ship fever and prison fever. It is probably covered in these figures by fevers and purples. "Convulsions" is listed as the main cause of death but would be the end stage of various fevers produced by infections. The second biggest cause of death was tuberculosis, accounting for 17%.

The Gentleman's Magazine was consulted at the Cheshire County Record Office.