Bills of mortality / by William A. Brend.

  • Brend, William Alfred, 1873-
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Bills of mortality / by William A. Brend. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    states that it was a disease of women, but this is presumably an error, for Shakespeare makes King Lear say : “ 0, how tliis mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio ! down, thou climbing sorrow I” It was clearly of a convulsive nature, and possibly was epilepsy. The “ lights ” were the lungs. “ Rising of the lights ” is variously given as heartburn, choking feeling in the throat, and globus hystericus. Probably it was applied to any condition accompanied by dyspnoea. An “ imposthume ” was an abscess ; “ calenture,” sunstroke; “ planet-struck,” paralysis ; “ livergrown,” rickets (Graunt); “ evil ” and “ King’s evil,” tuberculosis ; “ headmouldshot ” and “ horseshoe- head,” hydrocephalus ; “ flux,” dysentery ; and “ swine-pox,” chicken- pox. “Despair ” and “grief ” we should now call melancholia. It will be readily understood that a system of registration so highly defective as the Bills of Mortality was frequently and vigor- ously assailed by members of the medical profession. Many proposals were put forward to improve the Bills and to give them a more scientific character, but for various reasons these all came to naught. The fate of an attempt which was made in 1754 illustrates the kind of prejudice which was apt to be encountered. A group of physicians, in conjunction with the parish clerks, presented a Bill to Parliament requiring that all the parishes in England should be obliged to keep exact registers of births, deaths, and marriages, instead of christen- ings and burials only, and that an annual general Bill should be prepared for the whole country. At the same time the list of diseases was revised, and many obsolete terms were proposed to be deleted. The Bill was at first received with favour, and was ordered to be printed; but, unfortunately, a clause which required that the people should be numbered aroused hostility on religious grounds. “ Sin of David!” became the cry, and in the end the Bill was defeated by a large majority (vide Gentleman's Magazine, 1754). In this connection it is interesting to recall that the civil registration of births in the Act of 1836 met with considerable ecclesiastical opposi- tion on the ground that baptism and naming of the child were separated. It was feared that having registered the birth and named the child, parents would fail to celebrate the rites of baptism.