[1177] Supplement (Decennial) to the 45th Report of the Regr.-Genl. 1885, p. cxii.
[1178] The figures for 1721 are cited above (p. 485) from Douglass and others. Those for 1752 are given in the Gent. Magaz. 1753, Sept., p. 413, as “collected from the Accounts of the Overseers in the Twelve several Wards,” and sent by the Rev. T. Prince.
[1179] Supplementary Report of the Registrar-General, 1883. The mean death rate per 1000 living, for the period 1838-82, has been 71·0 males, and 61·2 females under five years of age; but as late as 1878 the annual average was the mean of the period, namely 71·2 males and 61·1 females.
[1180] Lettsom (Gent. Magaz. 1804, Aug. p. 701), in a preface to Neild’s papers on the state of the prisons, estimated that 40,000 lives might be saved every year in England by preventing infectious fevers, “for in this metropolis my respectable friend Thomas Bernard, Esq., whose caution and accuracy no person will doubt, calculates the number of victims at 3000 each year [doubtless from the London Bills of Mortality].... If to this pleasing view we add the preservation of 48,000 victims to the smallpox, which may now be preferred by the cowpox, we have in our power to possess the sublime contemplation of forming a saving fund of human life of nearly 88,000 persons annually in this empire, by the exercise of reason, philanthropy and judicious policy.”
[1181] Duvillard, Tableaux etc. Paris, 1806.
[1182] Essay on the Principle of Population. Bk. IV. chap. 5.
[1183] Robert Watt, M.D. Treatise on Chincough, with Inquiry into the Relative Mortality of the Diseases of Children in Glasgow. Glasgow, 1813.
[1184] John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, London, 1662, says: “The original entries in the Hall books were as exact in the very first year [he probably means 1629, which is the first year of his own extracts from them, but the classification of deaths began in 1604] as to all particulars, as now; and the specifying of casualties and diseases was probably more.” The searchers, he explains, were in many cases able to report the opinions of the physicians, receiving the same from the friends of the deceased; while for certain causes of death, among which he includes smallpox, “their own senses are sufficient.”
[1185] Cal. Coke MSS. (Hist. MSS. Commis.) I. 21 June, 1628.
[1186] Sutherland Letters, in Rep. Hist. MSS. Com. V. 152.