Featured on PDR in the collection London's Dreadful Visitation: A Year of Weekly Death Statistics during the Great Plague (1665)

Epidemics are on all our minds right now. Probably many of us could use a break from the relentless stream of statistics, percentages, and predictions related to Covid-19. Still, we thought a look at some statistics from an era when modern medicine had not yet been born might provide a little perspective. It was a need for historical perspective that, in fact, pushed Ellen Cotes to publish London's Dreadful Visitation, which collected all the “bills of mortality” printed in London during the Great Plague of 1665 (in which 100,000 people, or a quarter of the city’s population, perished). Lamenting the disappearance of the bills from the earlier "Great Plague" of forty years before ("the sight of them hath been much desired these times"), Cotes “resolved…