May 4, 2026 • 36 mins
John Graunt was a shopkeeper in 17th-century London who followed his own curiosity to a rather grand result. His work gave rise to the fields of demography and epidemiology.
Research:
- Berke, Olaf, et al. “Celebration day: 400th birthday of John Graunt, citizen scientist of London.” Environmental Health Review. 63(3): 67-69. 2020. https://doi.org/10.5864/d2020-018
- Britannica Editors. "John Graunt". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Apr. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Graunt
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Sir William Petty." Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Apr. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/money/William-Petty
- Clark, Andrew. “Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives.’” Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1898. https://dn790003.ca.archive.org/0/items/briefliveschiefl01aubruoft/briefliveschiefl01aubruoft.pdf
- Connor, Henry. “John Graunt F.R.S. (1620-74): The founding father of human demography, epidemiology and vital statistics.” Journal of medical biography 32,1 (2024): 57-69. doi:10.1177/09677720221079826
- Eschner, Kat. “People Have Been Using Big Data Since the 1600s.” Smithsonian. April 24, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-have-been-using-big-data-1600s-180962949/
- Glass, D.V., et al. “John Graunt and His Natural and Political Observations [and Discussion].” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 159, No. 974, A Discussion on Demography (Dec. 10, 1963), pp. 2-37 Published by: The Royal Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/90480
- Graunt, John. “Natural and political observations mentioned in a following index, and made upon the Bills of mortality.” Oxford : Printed by William Hall, for John Martyn, and James Allestry, printers to the Royal Society MDCLXV [1665]. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2356017R
- KARGON, ROBERT. “John Graunt, Francis Bacon, and the Royal Society: The Reception of Statistics.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 18, no. 4, 1963, pp. 337–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24621352
- Kelsey, Holly. “Sovereign and the Sick City in 1603.” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Aug. 23, 2016. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/sovereign-and-sick-city-1603/
- Lewin, C. G. "Graunt, John (1620–1674), statistician." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. August 08, 2024. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-11306
- Pepys, Samuel. “The Diary of Samuel Pepys.” GEORGE BELL & SONS. London. 1893. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4200/pg4200.txt
- Smith, R.M. (2008). “Graunt, John (1620–1674).” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_758-2
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's subject is
a person who's been on my list for a minute,
not a really commonly known name, but whose work is
(00:24):
probably impacting the life of every single person listening in
one way or another. He did this work nearly four
hundred years ago, but it really changed the way that
people perceived population and mortality by measuring it, because that
changes the outcome. We are talking about John Grant, who
was a shopkeeper in London who, through both personal connections
(00:48):
and a desire to just kind of follow his own
curiosity which I love to a rather grand result, became
very well respected among the city's most revered intellectuals. Work
gave rise to the field of demography and epidemiology, and
his work could be categorized as statistical analysis, although the
word statistics didn't even exist for another one hundred years
(01:11):
after he died. But that's who we're talking about today.
So John Grant was born April twenty fourth, sixteen twenty
in London, England, to Henry and Mary Grant, who raised
John and their other children. There may have been seven
other children raised the mall As Puritans at the end
of the seventeenth century. Antiquarian and philosopher John Aubrey included
(01:35):
Grant in his book Brief Lives, which covered notable seventeenth
century figures, and he quite charmingly describes the start of
Grant's life this way quote was born twenty four d
aprilis at the seven Stars in Burton Lane, London, in
the parish of Saint Michael's Cornhill, an hour before eight
(01:56):
o'clock on a Monday morning, the sign being in the
nine degree of Gemini that day at twelve o'clock. Anno
Domino sixteen twenty. Yeah, that Aubrey account will discuss a
good bit throughout this journey. But reading it is very
fun because it is, you know, old timy language. But
also I don't know, he just has a flare for
(02:18):
freezing that makes me chuckle. I like that the date
of his birth was in Latin. The rest of it's
not Latin, but just that part. That's kind of how
all of Brief Lives go. There's a little Latin sprinkled throughout.
For insussient flair. Although today Grant is pretty much always
mentioned as being a statistician or something related, that is
(02:39):
very far from where he started. This is going to
get into holly pedantry just a little, so bear with me.
He is described as a draper in some accounts and
a haberdasher in others. These are similar roles, but they're
actually different. A draper would have sold fabric for garment construction,
whereas a haberdash would have sold sewing notions, so things
(03:02):
like thread, buttons, et cetera. This is, of course also
different from the way the word haberdasher is used today
in North America, where it usually means somebody who sells
men's wear. In this case, this would not have been
a men'swear specific enterprise. So Grant, we know, would have
been selling sewing supplies of some type intended for garment construction,
(03:25):
but it's not one hundred percent clear if it was
fabric or notions. The Aubrey biography calls him a haberdasher,
noting he was quote haberdasher of small wares, but was
free of the draper's company. That small amount of words
just confuses things more because haberdashers and drapers in London
(03:45):
at this time already had completely separate guilds. However, Aubrey
seems to have been incorrect about Grant's guild status. John's father,
Henry Grant, was a member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers,
having been admitted in sixteen fourteen, and John apprenticed with
his father. According to Henry Conner, writing for the Journal
(04:05):
of Medical Biography in twenty twenty two, John Grant quote
was admitted by patrimony to the freedom of the Draper's
Company when twenty one, and granted the livery when thirty eight.
So for context, freedom admission indicates that a tradesperson is
set on the track to becoming a full member, and
then when they are granted livery, they have met certain
(04:27):
requirements and submitted a formal application. So it does appear
that Grant was a full member in the Draper's Guild. Yeah,
i e. Not a haberd usher. Tracy also pointed out
that that wording of Aubrey's could be confusing and mean
that he was a freeman within the Draper's Company. But
it doesn't seem like that's what he's getting at. I
(04:48):
could I'm wrong in my interpretation. We do know that
Grant got married the same year that he was admitted
to the Draper's Guild as a full member, so he
married a seventeen year old named Mary Scott. We know
very little about their marriage, although according to Aubrey, they
had two children who lived to adulthood, a son and
a daughter, and two other kids who died in infancy.
(05:11):
Those children were also daughters. The only details we know
about the surviving children also come from that Aubrey biography,
so a little bit difficult to substantiate. He states that
their son died as an adult in Persia and that
the daughter became a nun. Grant became very active in
his community and served in a number of civic roles,
(05:34):
including on London's Common Council and his later years, he
was also active in infrastructure projects like developing a canal
that brought water into the city. As part of his
standing as a citizen and a community leader, Grant was
also a member of London's Trained Bands. This was a
militia made up of homeowners within the city that served
(05:56):
as a defense force serving under the Lord Mayor. Was
often addressed as captain in various accounts of his life,
suggesting he attained that rank in the militia. Aubrey, who
knew Grant and was his friend, describes him as a
man who was well liked, pleasant and smart. In addition
(06:16):
to John Aubrey, a wide array of impressive friends clustered
around Grant, and many of them are well known today.
Samuel Peeps mentions Grant in his diaries, noting on April twentieth,
sixteen sixty three, quote, So to my office the remaining
part of the morning till towards noon, and then to
mister Grant's. There saw his prints, which he showed me,
(06:37):
and indeed are the best collection of any things almost
that ever I saw there. Being the prince of most
of the greatest houses, churches and antiquities in Italy and France,
and brave cuts, I had not time to look them
over as I ought, and which I will take time
hereafter to do, and therefore left them and home to dinner.
(06:58):
He became friendly with Sir Benjamin Rudyard, who was a
poet and a politician in Parliament. Painter John Hales was
another friend who would come to be known for his
portraits of Lady Diana Russell, Duchess of Bedford Lady Anne Russell,
Countess of Bedford, and Samuel Peeps, and several members of
Peeps's family. Another artist friend was Samuel Cooper, considered to
(07:21):
be maybe the best portrait miniature painter of the sixteen hundreds.
But the most well known of Grant's friends was William Petty. Petty,
who was three years younger than Grant, was a man
of many interests and abilities. He was a doctor, a
professor of both anatomy and music, and a surveyor, and
alongside his good friend John Grant, he became interested in
(07:43):
using available data to gain insight into the world around him.
But before that the two men were already very close.
Grant had helped Petty get his music professorship at Gresham College.
Petty gave Grant his power of attorney. In sixteen sixty
they purchased proper together on Lothbury Street, the short street
in London that was popular with professionals. This land is
(08:06):
now occupied by the Bank of England. Grant was, through
various groups and friendships, tied to a lot of the
city's intellectuals and leaders. Coming up, we will talk about
how Grant's own curiosity led him to start looking at
death statistics, but first we will pause for a sponsor break.
(08:34):
For some reason which remains unclear, Grant became really interested
in London's death records. They would have been commonly available,
and as a merchant, information about the shifts in the
city's population would have been important to John Grant and
to others. These accounts of the deaths in the city
have their own interesting stories. So we're gonna jump backwards
(08:55):
a little bit to the fifteen twenties. Starting in fifteen
twenty seven, the bills of mortality, which were simply lists
of the dead, began to be collected in London. The
oldest surviving bill of mortality that we know of is
from fifteen thirty two, and the gathering of this information
was done for the most part by elderly women of
(09:16):
the various parishes of the city. They were called searchers.
When someone died, allowed bell was rung to summon the searchers,
and a pair of them would go to the house
where the bell had come from to observe the body.
They would note each death, collect those names into lists,
which were submitted to the parish clerks, who then entered
them into the official record and also publish the list.
(09:38):
The names were not included in the list. The publicly
available records normally listed the parish and just the number
of deaths. And initially this job was really just to
determine if people had died of the plague so that
they could track that, But over time the searchers started
to include causes of death other than the plague, even
though they didn't really have medical trainings. They were kind
(10:00):
of going on a combo of common sense and vibes. Yeah,
if I remember correctly, we talked about these searchers in
our episode on Rickets. Yes, Rickets will come up later. Yeah,
it was one of the reasons that it was like,
we have these references to Rickets in these lists, but
(10:21):
we don't really know for sure if that was actually Ricketts.
So for a long time these lists were submitted on
kind of a random basis, but toward the end of
the sixteenth century, in fifteen ninety two, a set schedule
was established for their regular submission. At the time, the
cause of death also started to be recorded, with a
(10:41):
summary count of how many people in a given parish
died from it. This was because London experienced a high
death rate starting that year, as the city struggled through
a plague outbreak that shut down the theaters and the
public houses. When the plague began, the city had an
estimated one hundred and fifty thousand people. Roughly ten percent
of the population died during this outbreak, but once death
(11:05):
numbers started to drop, the bills of mortality became less frequent.
Over time, they did add in christenings, and they tracked
population growth through surviving infants. Then another plague hit the
city in sixteen oh three, just as James the sixth
of Scotland was taking on the additional title of James
the First of England and Ireland, and the newly established monarch,
(11:29):
in an effort to get the city through this plague crisis,
put out a book of orders regarding how various aspects
of the plague were to be dealt with. Some of
this we're going to talk about on Friday, and he
reinstated a regular schedule for the bills of mortality. Under
the new orders, searchers had to submit their lists on
Tuesdays and on Thursday mornings. The complete lists were made
(11:51):
available to the public, with copies available for a penny,
or people could get an annual subscription for four pennies,
which seems like a great deal. There was also an
annual report made that compiled the entire year's data that
was always published on the Thursday before Christmas every year.
It wasn't until sixteen twenty nine that the report separated
(12:13):
out deaths by male and female members of the population,
so for some example numbers, the report for all of
sixteen twenty five noted that the parish of Bennett's Grace
Church had forty eight deaths, sixteen from plague. The parish
of Martin's a Ludgate had two hundred and fifty four
deaths one hundred and sixty four from plague, et cetera.
(12:35):
The sixteen thirty two report that compiled the numbers by
cause of death listed six hundred and twenty eight deaths
from old age, one thousand, seven hundred ninety seven from consumption,
thirty eight executions of which thirteen were pressed to death,
thirty eight from purples and spotted fever, and six as
quotes dead in the street and starved. There are of
(12:59):
course more entries in both of these sample lists, as
well as other lists, but this gifts just a sense
of how basic these numbers were and in addition to
that simplicity, there was also a question regarding the accuracy
of the numbers. Yeah, we'll talk about that qu a
bit more. When Grant decided that he wanted to make
an earnest study of this material, he only worked with
(13:21):
the consistently published list from late sixteen oh three on.
There might actually be a minor bit of scandal regarding
his work with these records. According to Robert Cargan, writing
for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences in nineteen sixty three, quote, it is unknown how
the publication of the bills fared under the Commonwealth. The
(13:42):
parish clerk's registers before sixteen sixty four are missing, having
been loaned to Grant for his studies and never returned.
I will say there is also a chunk kind of
in the middle of that sixteen o three to sixteen
sixty when he was working, that he discarded because there
was some inconsistency and irregularity in him. But in sixteen
(14:03):
sixty two Grant published his assessment of all of this information,
of which there's a lot. We read a tiny smattering,
but like pages and pages and pages of lists. The
book that he created out of all of this was
natural and political observations made upon the Bills of Mortality.
It was the only book he ever published, but it
became the foundation of a really significant shift in the
(14:27):
way that people thought about population statistics. The inspiration for
this effort has been a matter of debate for centuries.
Often William Petty is credited with giving Grant the idea,
but every source that says so seems to be pulling
from that John Aubrey biography, which we know might not
always be accurate. Grant himself gave the reason he started
(14:50):
examining all the data in the preface to his book, quote,
having been born and bred in the city of London,
and having always observed the most of them who constantly
took in the weekly Bills of Mortality, made little other
use of them than to look at the foot how
the burials increased or decreased, and among the casualties, what
(15:12):
had happened rare and extraordinary in the week of the current,
so they might take the same as a text to
talk about in the next company and withal in the
plague time, how the sickness increased or decreased, That so
the rich might judge of the necessity of their removal,
and tradesmen might conjecture what doings they were like to
(15:33):
have in their respective dealings. Now I thought that the
wisdom of our city had certainly designed the laudable practice
of taking and distributing these accompts for other and greater
uses than those above mentioned, or at least that some
other uses might be made of them. And thereupon, I,
casting mine eye upon so many of the general bills
(15:55):
as next came to hand, I found encouragement from them
to look out all the bills I could, and to
be short to furnish myself with as much matter of
that kind, even as the hall of the parish clerks
could afford me the which when I had reduced to
into tables, so as to have a view of the
(16:16):
whole together, in order to the more ready comparing of
one year season perish or other division of the city
with another. So to translate that somewhat stilted and run
on passage which Tracy just good naturedly worked her way through,
uh Grant realized even people who read those reports every
(16:37):
week were kind of just doing so. To look at
the death totals so that they'd have something to talk
about or to see if they should get out of
town because things were getting dire with something. He had
thought that the city government might be using that information
in some way, but realized no one was really tracking
the data in ways that might show patterns or change
over time, so he just decided to do that himself.
(17:00):
He does not mention his friend, Sir William Petty giving
him the idea, or in fact mention him at all.
In the dedication of the book, Grant states that quote, now,
having I know not by what accident engaged my thoughts
upon the Bills of Mortality, I have presumed to sacrifice
these my small but first published labors unto your lordship.
(17:21):
We're going to talk about who that dedication is addressed
to in a bit, but the important thing is that
Grant characterizes his interest in the bills as an accident
that he doesn't even remember. Grant also made it clear
in his writing that he didn't want to go through
this exercise if it was not actually helpful in some way.
Quote moreover, finding some truths and not commonly believed opinions
(17:46):
to arise from my meditations upon these neglected papers. I
proceeded further to consider what benefit the knowledge of the
fame would bring to the world, that I might not
engage myself in idle and useless speculations, but present the
world with some real fruit from those airy blossoms. So
(18:07):
Grant really did want there to be some real world
benefit from this whole exercise. And Grant lays out some
of the accuracy problems that we mentioned a few moments
ago in his writing, noting that the searchers who collected
this information may be quote, perhaps ignorant and careless in
their work, which apparently was a known problem. There was
(18:29):
not really a system of fact checking their numbers or
what information they included in their reports. Additionally, Grant notes
that these women would sometimes take favors or bribes to
record a cause of death as a less embarrassing or
scandalous one than the deceased family may have found it.
A significant example for this was syphilis that was recorded
(18:51):
in the bills under the title French pox, but according
to Grant, the searchers, after quote the mist of a
cup of ale and the bribe of a two grin fee,
would record that death instead as consumption. Another problem was
that the way these numbers were laid out left a
lot of information to just be assumed or interpreted. Grant
(19:12):
noted that when a person was said to have died
of old age, it doesn't give information regarding what that
age was or whether there may have been some specific
condition involved. There are also no specifics of what qualifies
a child to be categorized as an infant. But Grant
seems to have come to the conclusion that the records
(19:34):
submitted by the searchers are probably relatively accurate in terms
of cause of death because he believes they consulted physicians
and also use their own judgment. But he also notes
that not all diseases present in obvious ways, so said
deaths might be difficult to report accurately regarding their cause.
(19:54):
He lays all this out to explain the way he's
approaching these numbers for comparisons. He's clear that there are
places where he has to operate on assumption and that
he welcomes criticism. Yeah. I was reading a modern take
on some of it, and they put it very gingerly
by saying like he does a bit too much smoothing
at times. I was like, that's a perfect way to
(20:16):
put it, we are going to get into the various
conclusions that Grant drew from analyzing the Bills of Mortality,
as well as talk about the later part of his life,
and we'll do that after we hear from the sponsors
that keep the show going. In his writing, John Grant
(20:40):
draws some conclusions outside of just crunching numbers, some of
which are debatable but show that he is thinking about
ways of applying all of this information. For instance, he
notes that there are very few deaths from starvation, but
that London has a lot of people panhandling and begging
for food, and he wonders quote that it were better
to maintain all beggars at the public charge, though earning nothing,
(21:03):
than to let them beg about the streets, and that
employing them without discretion may do more harm than good.
He doesn't elaborate, so it's unclear if he means to
make these people wards of the state or provide for
them in some other way, but he's basically saying like,
you can't just hire them into jobs because they might
not know what they're doing and it could cause a
lot of problems. He also noted that Ricketts as Tracy
(21:26):
mentioned earlier had risen over the years, seemingly popping up
out of nowhere, asking in his work quote now, the
question is whether that disease did first appear about that time,
or whether a disease which had been long before did
then first receive its name. Then identified other diseases like
liver grown that were dropping off the list in frequency
(21:49):
and that had probably been rickets before that disease had
been better understood and more consistently diagnosed. There were a
number of ways in which the way John Grant looked
at the numbers the bills of mortality that contradicted a
lot of commonly held beliefs. If you had asked most
Londoners in sixteen sixty how the population was divided between
(22:10):
men and women, most probably would have told you there
were three women to every man. This is something that
was routinely stated. But when Grant actually looked at the
numbers of male and female babies born, combined with the
mortality rates, he discovered that more male babies than female
babies were born, they also had a higher mortality rate,
(22:33):
and that when comparing that information to adult deaths, the
population was actually divided almost evenly, but slightly skewed higher
in men in the country, with sixteen men to every
fifteen women. In the city proper, there were thirteen women
for every fourteen men. He also calculated the population of London,
(22:54):
creating a piece of data that had been elusive for
a long time due to rudimentary reporting practices. There were
rumors that he talks about that there were as many
as two million people in London, and he didn't think
that was right, so he really wanted to focus on this.
Based on available death and household numbers, which were not
comprehensive for the entire city but were in some areas,
(23:18):
Grant calculated that for every eleven families in London, there
were three deaths per year. Using those numbers, he looked
at the total average of deaths per year in the
city according to the Bill's immortality that was thirteen thousand,
and then using those numbers, he could calculate that there
were forty six thousand, six hundred sixty seven households in
(23:39):
the city. He used the assumption of eight members per
household based on averages plus the rate of population increased
through average number of people moving into the city to
land at a total of three hundred eighty four thousand people,
one hundred ninety nine thousand, one hundred twelve male, one
hundred eighty four thousand, eight hundred eighty six female. He
(24:00):
then cross checked his own work by using different numbers
from the table to calculate the population in multiple different ways.
He also noted that death rates were higher in the
city than in the more rural parishes, with more people
per one hundred surviving past the age of seventy in
the country. This led him to conclude that the country
(24:20):
was quote more healthful than the city. His research noted
that chronic diseases tended to have stable rates of death,
whereas contagious diseases had greater fluctuation by season and location.
As for the city being a more dangerous place, Grant
identified one of the big problems, which was overcrowding. He wrote,
(24:41):
quote London, the metropolis of England is perhaps head too
big for the body, and possibly too strong. That this
head grows three times as fast as the body unto
which it belongs, that is, it doubles its people in
third part of the time. He notes that the street
were not big or stable enough for the many carriages
(25:03):
that passed through them, and that the way that that
he had been organized in its earlier years just did
not suit its needs anymore. Yeah, at this point it
was still very much laid out in its medieval form,
and it was becoming like it was just on the
cusp of getting into industrialization, and like I was not
cutting it. He also came up with a life table
(25:24):
that showed the statistics of deaths based on age over time.
This is something that is like the foundation of demography,
and though these exact numbers aren't used all the time,
the concept is this was very basic. It gave the
information that out of one hundred berths, which he called
quick conceptions, thirty six people will have died before the
age of six, then twenty four more in the decade
(25:47):
that follows, fifteen more in the decade after that, and
so on and so on. In his estimation, only one
could reasonably be expected to survive to the age of
seventy six. But though this was interesting and he developed
a distribution formula to arrive at these numbers, it was
also a good bit of guesswork. It was in reference
(26:07):
to this that I saw someone in right Lake. He
did a bit too much smoothing. He also noted that
this isn't a precise model, but quote that the numbers
following are practically near enough to the truth. Men do
not die in exact proportion nor infractions. Working from that table,
he described the population in percentages, stating that quote it
(26:28):
follows also that of all which have been conceived, there
are now alive forty percent above sixteen years old, twenty
five above twenty six years old, et ce. Grant's book,
relaying all this information and the ways he had used
the basic bills of mortality to extrapolate a numerical assessment
of London, was only ninety seven pages long, but it
(26:51):
had a massive impact. He submitted fifty copies of his
book to the Royal Society for members to read. He
had also dedicated the book to the President of the
Royal Society, Sir Robert Moray, which was a really a
stup move. Physician doctor Daniel Whistler nominated Grant for membership
in the Society. This was a pretty unusual situation and
(27:13):
it shows just how important the Society thought his work was.
Grant wasn't a scientist, and he wasn't from the aristocracy.
He was a tradesman who hadn't attended a university, so
not at all the kind of person who was expected
to be a member of the Royal Society. But the
Royal Society was also quite new, having been founded in
sixteen sixty, so it wasn't as though his nomination broke
(27:36):
decades of tradition. King Charles the Scond supported his application
and made a statement that if the Royal Society found
any more tradesmen like Grant, they should admit them as well.
Grant was indeed made a fellow. He published several editions
in the following years, updating the tables each time he
(27:57):
learned new information that led to refined numbers. He notated
the ways he had estimated things incorrectly in earlier versions,
like supposing that households had an average of eight people
when five was really more accurate. Because of all of
this work, Grant is frequently called the father of demography,
(28:18):
so anytime someone is referencing demographics, they're referencing his work,
at least indirectly. Other prominent thinkers of Grant's day were
influenced by his work and continued it or adapted it
into their own fields. France began its own similar record keeping.
After Grant's work became known and his friend Sir William
(28:38):
Petty used the example Grant had set to start looking
at the ways that death related to economic loss within
a community. He published his work Essays in Political Arithmetic
and Political Survey or Anatomy of Ireland in sixteen seventy two,
after building on the work that Grant had done in London.
That work launched a wave of probability mathematic and while
(29:00):
its flaws are recognized, the concepts of it are still
in use today. Just three years after Grant's book was
first published, London experienced a surgeon plague, which is commonly
known as the Great Plague of sixteen sixty five. Grant's
updated numbers regarding the size of the population that year,
which he thought maxed out at four hundred and sixty thousand,
(29:22):
is one of the only ways to really know today
just how impactful the death toll was that is usually
estimated to be around one hundred thousand people over the
course of a year and a half. In sixteen sixty six,
London experienced the Great Fire and Grant was hit very
hard by it. His house in a shop burned down.
(29:43):
Petty helped finance the rebuilding of Grant's home, but he
never really financially recovered and he had to sell his
remaining property, some of it to Petty, and he may
have declared bankruptcy. This is another thing that the Aubrey
account says, but there's no documentation to back it up. However,
a lot of documents were destroyed in that fire, and
(30:05):
Grant's work is some of the only way that we
know about numbers in London at the time, because everything
else burned. But Grant and Petty started to have some
disagreements over money that really shifted the dynamic of their
friendship at this time. During this time of uncertainty, Grant
became a Roman Catholic, and this was an unusual and
unpopular move during this time in England. Refusing to attend
(30:30):
Anglican services was considered a statutory offense. The conversion really
took a toll on what was left of his friendship
with Petty. Petty wrote to Grant in January of sixteen
seventy three, quote, as for differences in religion, you have
done a miss in sundry particulars which I need not mention,
(30:50):
because yourself may easily conjecture my meetings. However, we leave
these things to God and be mindful of what is
the sum of all religion, and of what is and
ever was true religion all the world over. Petty also
confided in a letter to a friend soon after, quote,
Captain Grant is now an open and zealous champion for popery.
(31:13):
Wherefore I have not so much intimacy with him as formerly.
We mentioned earlier in the episode that Grant was part
of an infrastructure project that brought water into the city.
That work was done by the New River Company, at
which Grant was in a managerial position. His Catholicism caused
(31:34):
so many problems and was so despised by many Londoners
that a rumor started that he had been, perhaps somehow
to blame for the Great Fire, and that he had
prevented water from reaching the city to douse the flames
as part of being in this role, and this actually
got him in legal trouble, although he was ultimately found
to have done no such thing. He actually was not
(31:55):
in that managerial position until after the fire had taken place.
Although his innocence on that matter had been proven, his
status as a Catholic continued to isolate him professionally and socially.
He was called before the court twice on the charge
of recusancy failing to attend Anglican church, and he pled
(32:16):
not guilty. His case was scheduled for trial and if
he was found guilty, his property would be seized by
the Crown, but that trial never happened. In the early
sixteen seventies, Grant developed liver disease. He died on April eighteenth,
seventeen sixty four before his trial date. His cause of
death is given as jaundice. He was buried at Saint
(32:38):
Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street. Although their relationship had suffered,
Petty attended his funeral and was deeply upset. Petty took
care of Grant's widow Mary financially in the years after this,
and now today we have actuaries. Yeah, thanks John Grant.
John Grant is mentioned in the episode that you wrote
(32:59):
about actuarial science. Yes, we love all of the actuaries.
We love it. I have a very fun listener mail
which also mentions and shares flowers. We'll get to it.
This from our listener, Jamie, who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
(33:21):
I just finished your episode on James Braid and wanted
to share my experience with hypnotism. After graduating my high school,
at a party where, among other things, a hypnotist performed,
I was chosen as one of the participants. It was
an interesting experience. I remember a few things. It was
more than a few years ago now for me. I
was aware the whole time, but I just did exactly
(33:43):
what I thought. Like when we were told it was
very cold, I cuddled to the person next to me.
I was told to give a different name every time
the hypnotist asked my name, and it was going good
until he asked my name after someone else's who had
responded sam. My brain supplied the same name. But then
I thought I can't be Sam he is, and so
(34:03):
I said Samantha. My hesitation obviously showed that I was
coming out of it, so that was the end of
my part. While I was open to suggestion, I also
couldn't overcome my own strongly held beliefs. I can't imagine
how the woman whose neck was set to one side
was able to move it through hypnotism. Listen me either anyway.
(34:24):
As a reward for reading through all that, please enjoy
these flowers. In Pella, Iowa, there is a tulip festival.
The town plants thousands of different kinds of tulips, and
driving a few hours to see them in May is
much easier than flying to Amsterdam. I have never seen
so many different kinds, and I hope you enjoy them.
Thanks for all you do. I truly appreciate your show
(34:44):
and the hard work you put into it. And there
are beautiful pictures of tulips. There are some pink ones,
some orange ones, some yellow ones, and some that look black,
which I come up with, And I'm like, will those
grow in Georgia, because maybe I start planning tulips. Listen,
we love a little gothic flower in our house. I
(35:04):
am glad to have gotten Jamie's account of being hypnotized. Yeah,
I realized, I don't think I've ever been hypnotized. And
I'm like, would that work for me? Or would I
be a pain in the Would I be the problem
child that's like this isn't working, that tries to be
a trouble. Yeah. When I was in college, we had
a couple of you know, the things arranged by the
(35:27):
student affairs committee or whatever, like, yeah, whoever was arranging
entertainment on campus, and there were a couple of different
times that there was a hypnotist show, and I always
found it so fascinating what was happening, and then also
was curious of like is this actually staged or is
(35:48):
this really happening? Yeah, which was going on during James
Braid's time as well. Correct. If you would like to
email us to tell us about your experience with hypnotism
or with tulips or your pets or whatever you wish,
you could do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you would like to read the show notes, those
are available at mystonhistory dot com. We put them up
(36:10):
for every episode we do. And if you have not
subscribed to the podcast and you would like to, you
can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(36:31):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's subject is
a person who's been on my list for a minute,
not a really commonly known name, but whose work is
(00:24):
probably impacting the life of every single person listening in
one way or another. He did this work nearly four
hundred years ago, but it really changed the way that
people perceived population and mortality by measuring it, because that
changes the outcome. We are talking about John Grant, who
was a shopkeeper in London who, through both personal connections
(00:48):
and a desire to just kind of follow his own
curiosity which I love to a rather grand result, became
very well respected among the city's most revered intellectuals. Work
gave rise to the field of demography and epidemiology, and
his work could be categorized as statistical analysis, although the
word statistics didn't even exist for another one hundred years
(01:11):
after he died. But that's who we're talking about today.
So John Grant was born April twenty fourth, sixteen twenty
in London, England, to Henry and Mary Grant, who raised
John and their other children. There may have been seven
other children raised the mall As Puritans at the end
of the seventeenth century. Antiquarian and philosopher John Aubrey included
(01:35):
Grant in his book Brief Lives, which covered notable seventeenth
century figures, and he quite charmingly describes the start of
Grant's life this way quote was born twenty four d
aprilis at the seven Stars in Burton Lane, London, in
the parish of Saint Michael's Cornhill, an hour before eight
(01:56):
o'clock on a Monday morning, the sign being in the
nine degree of Gemini that day at twelve o'clock. Anno
Domino sixteen twenty. Yeah, that Aubrey account will discuss a
good bit throughout this journey. But reading it is very
fun because it is, you know, old timy language. But
also I don't know, he just has a flare for
(02:18):
freezing that makes me chuckle. I like that the date
of his birth was in Latin. The rest of it's
not Latin, but just that part. That's kind of how
all of Brief Lives go. There's a little Latin sprinkled throughout.
For insussient flair. Although today Grant is pretty much always
mentioned as being a statistician or something related, that is
(02:39):
very far from where he started. This is going to
get into holly pedantry just a little, so bear with me.
He is described as a draper in some accounts and
a haberdasher in others. These are similar roles, but they're
actually different. A draper would have sold fabric for garment construction,
whereas a haberdash would have sold sewing notions, so things
(03:02):
like thread, buttons, et cetera. This is, of course also
different from the way the word haberdasher is used today
in North America, where it usually means somebody who sells
men's wear. In this case, this would not have been
a men'swear specific enterprise. So Grant, we know, would have
been selling sewing supplies of some type intended for garment construction,
(03:25):
but it's not one hundred percent clear if it was
fabric or notions. The Aubrey biography calls him a haberdasher,
noting he was quote haberdasher of small wares, but was
free of the draper's company. That small amount of words
just confuses things more because haberdashers and drapers in London
(03:45):
at this time already had completely separate guilds. However, Aubrey
seems to have been incorrect about Grant's guild status. John's father,
Henry Grant, was a member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers,
having been admitted in sixteen fourteen, and John apprenticed with
his father. According to Henry Conner, writing for the Journal
(04:05):
of Medical Biography in twenty twenty two, John Grant quote
was admitted by patrimony to the freedom of the Draper's
Company when twenty one, and granted the livery when thirty eight.
So for context, freedom admission indicates that a tradesperson is
set on the track to becoming a full member, and
then when they are granted livery, they have met certain
(04:27):
requirements and submitted a formal application. So it does appear
that Grant was a full member in the Draper's Guild. Yeah,
i e. Not a haberd usher. Tracy also pointed out
that that wording of Aubrey's could be confusing and mean
that he was a freeman within the Draper's Company. But
it doesn't seem like that's what he's getting at. I
(04:48):
could I'm wrong in my interpretation. We do know that
Grant got married the same year that he was admitted
to the Draper's Guild as a full member, so he
married a seventeen year old named Mary Scott. We know
very little about their marriage, although according to Aubrey, they
had two children who lived to adulthood, a son and
a daughter, and two other kids who died in infancy.
(05:11):
Those children were also daughters. The only details we know
about the surviving children also come from that Aubrey biography,
so a little bit difficult to substantiate. He states that
their son died as an adult in Persia and that
the daughter became a nun. Grant became very active in
his community and served in a number of civic roles,
(05:34):
including on London's Common Council and his later years, he
was also active in infrastructure projects like developing a canal
that brought water into the city. As part of his
standing as a citizen and a community leader, Grant was
also a member of London's Trained Bands. This was a
militia made up of homeowners within the city that served
(05:56):
as a defense force serving under the Lord Mayor. Was
often addressed as captain in various accounts of his life,
suggesting he attained that rank in the militia. Aubrey, who
knew Grant and was his friend, describes him as a
man who was well liked, pleasant and smart. In addition
(06:16):
to John Aubrey, a wide array of impressive friends clustered
around Grant, and many of them are well known today.
Samuel Peeps mentions Grant in his diaries, noting on April twentieth,
sixteen sixty three, quote, So to my office the remaining
part of the morning till towards noon, and then to
mister Grant's. There saw his prints, which he showed me,
(06:37):
and indeed are the best collection of any things almost
that ever I saw there. Being the prince of most
of the greatest houses, churches and antiquities in Italy and France,
and brave cuts, I had not time to look them
over as I ought, and which I will take time
hereafter to do, and therefore left them and home to dinner.
(06:58):
He became friendly with Sir Benjamin Rudyard, who was a
poet and a politician in Parliament. Painter John Hales was
another friend who would come to be known for his
portraits of Lady Diana Russell, Duchess of Bedford Lady Anne Russell,
Countess of Bedford, and Samuel Peeps, and several members of
Peeps's family. Another artist friend was Samuel Cooper, considered to
(07:21):
be maybe the best portrait miniature painter of the sixteen hundreds.
But the most well known of Grant's friends was William Petty. Petty,
who was three years younger than Grant, was a man
of many interests and abilities. He was a doctor, a
professor of both anatomy and music, and a surveyor, and
alongside his good friend John Grant, he became interested in
(07:43):
using available data to gain insight into the world around him.
But before that the two men were already very close.
Grant had helped Petty get his music professorship at Gresham College.
Petty gave Grant his power of attorney. In sixteen sixty
they purchased proper together on Lothbury Street, the short street
in London that was popular with professionals. This land is
(08:06):
now occupied by the Bank of England. Grant was, through
various groups and friendships, tied to a lot of the
city's intellectuals and leaders. Coming up, we will talk about
how Grant's own curiosity led him to start looking at
death statistics, but first we will pause for a sponsor break.
(08:34):
For some reason which remains unclear, Grant became really interested
in London's death records. They would have been commonly available,
and as a merchant, information about the shifts in the
city's population would have been important to John Grant and
to others. These accounts of the deaths in the city
have their own interesting stories. So we're gonna jump backwards
(08:55):
a little bit to the fifteen twenties. Starting in fifteen
twenty seven, the bills of mortality, which were simply lists
of the dead, began to be collected in London. The
oldest surviving bill of mortality that we know of is
from fifteen thirty two, and the gathering of this information
was done for the most part by elderly women of
(09:16):
the various parishes of the city. They were called searchers.
When someone died, allowed bell was rung to summon the searchers,
and a pair of them would go to the house
where the bell had come from to observe the body.
They would note each death, collect those names into lists,
which were submitted to the parish clerks, who then entered
them into the official record and also publish the list.
(09:38):
The names were not included in the list. The publicly
available records normally listed the parish and just the number
of deaths. And initially this job was really just to
determine if people had died of the plague so that
they could track that, But over time the searchers started
to include causes of death other than the plague, even
though they didn't really have medical trainings. They were kind
(10:00):
of going on a combo of common sense and vibes. Yeah,
if I remember correctly, we talked about these searchers in
our episode on Rickets. Yes, Rickets will come up later. Yeah,
it was one of the reasons that it was like,
we have these references to Rickets in these lists, but
(10:21):
we don't really know for sure if that was actually Ricketts.
So for a long time these lists were submitted on
kind of a random basis, but toward the end of
the sixteenth century, in fifteen ninety two, a set schedule
was established for their regular submission. At the time, the
cause of death also started to be recorded, with a
(10:41):
summary count of how many people in a given parish
died from it. This was because London experienced a high
death rate starting that year, as the city struggled through
a plague outbreak that shut down the theaters and the
public houses. When the plague began, the city had an
estimated one hundred and fifty thousand people. Roughly ten percent
of the population died during this outbreak, but once death
(11:05):
numbers started to drop, the bills of mortality became less frequent.
Over time, they did add in christenings, and they tracked
population growth through surviving infants. Then another plague hit the
city in sixteen oh three, just as James the sixth
of Scotland was taking on the additional title of James
the First of England and Ireland, and the newly established monarch,
(11:29):
in an effort to get the city through this plague crisis,
put out a book of orders regarding how various aspects
of the plague were to be dealt with. Some of
this we're going to talk about on Friday, and he
reinstated a regular schedule for the bills of mortality. Under
the new orders, searchers had to submit their lists on
Tuesdays and on Thursday mornings. The complete lists were made
(11:51):
available to the public, with copies available for a penny,
or people could get an annual subscription for four pennies,
which seems like a great deal. There was also an
annual report made that compiled the entire year's data that
was always published on the Thursday before Christmas every year.
It wasn't until sixteen twenty nine that the report separated
(12:13):
out deaths by male and female members of the population,
so for some example numbers, the report for all of
sixteen twenty five noted that the parish of Bennett's Grace
Church had forty eight deaths, sixteen from plague. The parish
of Martin's a Ludgate had two hundred and fifty four
deaths one hundred and sixty four from plague, et cetera.
(12:35):
The sixteen thirty two report that compiled the numbers by
cause of death listed six hundred and twenty eight deaths
from old age, one thousand, seven hundred ninety seven from consumption,
thirty eight executions of which thirteen were pressed to death,
thirty eight from purples and spotted fever, and six as
quotes dead in the street and starved. There are of
(12:59):
course more entries in both of these sample lists, as
well as other lists, but this gifts just a sense
of how basic these numbers were and in addition to
that simplicity, there was also a question regarding the accuracy
of the numbers. Yeah, we'll talk about that qu a
bit more. When Grant decided that he wanted to make
an earnest study of this material, he only worked with
(13:21):
the consistently published list from late sixteen oh three on.
There might actually be a minor bit of scandal regarding
his work with these records. According to Robert Cargan, writing
for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences in nineteen sixty three, quote, it is unknown how
the publication of the bills fared under the Commonwealth. The
(13:42):
parish clerk's registers before sixteen sixty four are missing, having
been loaned to Grant for his studies and never returned.
I will say there is also a chunk kind of
in the middle of that sixteen o three to sixteen
sixty when he was working, that he discarded because there
was some inconsistency and irregularity in him. But in sixteen
(14:03):
sixty two Grant published his assessment of all of this information,
of which there's a lot. We read a tiny smattering,
but like pages and pages and pages of lists. The
book that he created out of all of this was
natural and political observations made upon the Bills of Mortality.
It was the only book he ever published, but it
became the foundation of a really significant shift in the
(14:27):
way that people thought about population statistics. The inspiration for
this effort has been a matter of debate for centuries.
Often William Petty is credited with giving Grant the idea,
but every source that says so seems to be pulling
from that John Aubrey biography, which we know might not
always be accurate. Grant himself gave the reason he started
(14:50):
examining all the data in the preface to his book, quote,
having been born and bred in the city of London,
and having always observed the most of them who constantly
took in the weekly Bills of Mortality, made little other
use of them than to look at the foot how
the burials increased or decreased, and among the casualties, what
(15:12):
had happened rare and extraordinary in the week of the current,
so they might take the same as a text to
talk about in the next company and withal in the
plague time, how the sickness increased or decreased, That so
the rich might judge of the necessity of their removal,
and tradesmen might conjecture what doings they were like to
(15:33):
have in their respective dealings. Now I thought that the
wisdom of our city had certainly designed the laudable practice
of taking and distributing these accompts for other and greater
uses than those above mentioned, or at least that some
other uses might be made of them. And thereupon, I,
casting mine eye upon so many of the general bills
(15:55):
as next came to hand, I found encouragement from them
to look out all the bills I could, and to
be short to furnish myself with as much matter of
that kind, even as the hall of the parish clerks
could afford me the which when I had reduced to
into tables, so as to have a view of the
(16:16):
whole together, in order to the more ready comparing of
one year season perish or other division of the city
with another. So to translate that somewhat stilted and run
on passage which Tracy just good naturedly worked her way through,
uh Grant realized even people who read those reports every
(16:37):
week were kind of just doing so. To look at
the death totals so that they'd have something to talk
about or to see if they should get out of
town because things were getting dire with something. He had
thought that the city government might be using that information
in some way, but realized no one was really tracking
the data in ways that might show patterns or change
over time, so he just decided to do that himself.
(17:00):
He does not mention his friend, Sir William Petty giving
him the idea, or in fact mention him at all.
In the dedication of the book, Grant states that quote, now,
having I know not by what accident engaged my thoughts
upon the Bills of Mortality, I have presumed to sacrifice
these my small but first published labors unto your lordship.
(17:21):
We're going to talk about who that dedication is addressed
to in a bit, but the important thing is that
Grant characterizes his interest in the bills as an accident
that he doesn't even remember. Grant also made it clear
in his writing that he didn't want to go through
this exercise if it was not actually helpful in some way.
Quote moreover, finding some truths and not commonly believed opinions
(17:46):
to arise from my meditations upon these neglected papers. I
proceeded further to consider what benefit the knowledge of the
fame would bring to the world, that I might not
engage myself in idle and useless speculations, but present the
world with some real fruit from those airy blossoms. So
(18:07):
Grant really did want there to be some real world
benefit from this whole exercise. And Grant lays out some
of the accuracy problems that we mentioned a few moments
ago in his writing, noting that the searchers who collected
this information may be quote, perhaps ignorant and careless in
their work, which apparently was a known problem. There was
(18:29):
not really a system of fact checking their numbers or
what information they included in their reports. Additionally, Grant notes
that these women would sometimes take favors or bribes to
record a cause of death as a less embarrassing or
scandalous one than the deceased family may have found it.
A significant example for this was syphilis that was recorded
(18:51):
in the bills under the title French pox, but according
to Grant, the searchers, after quote the mist of a
cup of ale and the bribe of a two grin fee,
would record that death instead as consumption. Another problem was
that the way these numbers were laid out left a
lot of information to just be assumed or interpreted. Grant
(19:12):
noted that when a person was said to have died
of old age, it doesn't give information regarding what that
age was or whether there may have been some specific
condition involved. There are also no specifics of what qualifies
a child to be categorized as an infant. But Grant
seems to have come to the conclusion that the records
(19:34):
submitted by the searchers are probably relatively accurate in terms
of cause of death because he believes they consulted physicians
and also use their own judgment. But he also notes
that not all diseases present in obvious ways, so said
deaths might be difficult to report accurately regarding their cause.
(19:54):
He lays all this out to explain the way he's
approaching these numbers for comparisons. He's clear that there are
places where he has to operate on assumption and that
he welcomes criticism. Yeah. I was reading a modern take
on some of it, and they put it very gingerly
by saying like he does a bit too much smoothing
at times. I was like, that's a perfect way to
(20:16):
put it, we are going to get into the various
conclusions that Grant drew from analyzing the Bills of Mortality,
as well as talk about the later part of his life,
and we'll do that after we hear from the sponsors
that keep the show going. In his writing, John Grant
(20:40):
draws some conclusions outside of just crunching numbers, some of
which are debatable but show that he is thinking about
ways of applying all of this information. For instance, he
notes that there are very few deaths from starvation, but
that London has a lot of people panhandling and begging
for food, and he wonders quote that it were better
to maintain all beggars at the public charge, though earning nothing,
(21:03):
than to let them beg about the streets, and that
employing them without discretion may do more harm than good.
He doesn't elaborate, so it's unclear if he means to
make these people wards of the state or provide for
them in some other way, but he's basically saying like,
you can't just hire them into jobs because they might
not know what they're doing and it could cause a
lot of problems. He also noted that Ricketts as Tracy
(21:26):
mentioned earlier had risen over the years, seemingly popping up
out of nowhere, asking in his work quote now, the
question is whether that disease did first appear about that time,
or whether a disease which had been long before did
then first receive its name. Then identified other diseases like
liver grown that were dropping off the list in frequency
(21:49):
and that had probably been rickets before that disease had
been better understood and more consistently diagnosed. There were a
number of ways in which the way John Grant looked
at the numbers the bills of mortality that contradicted a
lot of commonly held beliefs. If you had asked most
Londoners in sixteen sixty how the population was divided between
(22:10):
men and women, most probably would have told you there
were three women to every man. This is something that
was routinely stated. But when Grant actually looked at the
numbers of male and female babies born, combined with the
mortality rates, he discovered that more male babies than female
babies were born, they also had a higher mortality rate,
(22:33):
and that when comparing that information to adult deaths, the
population was actually divided almost evenly, but slightly skewed higher
in men in the country, with sixteen men to every
fifteen women. In the city proper, there were thirteen women
for every fourteen men. He also calculated the population of London,
(22:54):
creating a piece of data that had been elusive for
a long time due to rudimentary reporting practices. There were
rumors that he talks about that there were as many
as two million people in London, and he didn't think
that was right, so he really wanted to focus on this.
Based on available death and household numbers, which were not
comprehensive for the entire city but were in some areas,
(23:18):
Grant calculated that for every eleven families in London, there
were three deaths per year. Using those numbers, he looked
at the total average of deaths per year in the
city according to the Bill's immortality that was thirteen thousand,
and then using those numbers, he could calculate that there
were forty six thousand, six hundred sixty seven households in
(23:39):
the city. He used the assumption of eight members per
household based on averages plus the rate of population increased
through average number of people moving into the city to
land at a total of three hundred eighty four thousand people,
one hundred ninety nine thousand, one hundred twelve male, one
hundred eighty four thousand, eight hundred eighty six female. He
(24:00):
then cross checked his own work by using different numbers
from the table to calculate the population in multiple different ways.
He also noted that death rates were higher in the
city than in the more rural parishes, with more people
per one hundred surviving past the age of seventy in
the country. This led him to conclude that the country
(24:20):
was quote more healthful than the city. His research noted
that chronic diseases tended to have stable rates of death,
whereas contagious diseases had greater fluctuation by season and location.
As for the city being a more dangerous place, Grant
identified one of the big problems, which was overcrowding. He wrote,
(24:41):
quote London, the metropolis of England is perhaps head too
big for the body, and possibly too strong. That this
head grows three times as fast as the body unto
which it belongs, that is, it doubles its people in
third part of the time. He notes that the street
were not big or stable enough for the many carriages
(25:03):
that passed through them, and that the way that that
he had been organized in its earlier years just did
not suit its needs anymore. Yeah, at this point it
was still very much laid out in its medieval form,
and it was becoming like it was just on the
cusp of getting into industrialization, and like I was not
cutting it. He also came up with a life table
(25:24):
that showed the statistics of deaths based on age over time.
This is something that is like the foundation of demography,
and though these exact numbers aren't used all the time,
the concept is this was very basic. It gave the
information that out of one hundred berths, which he called
quick conceptions, thirty six people will have died before the
age of six, then twenty four more in the decade
(25:47):
that follows, fifteen more in the decade after that, and
so on and so on. In his estimation, only one
could reasonably be expected to survive to the age of
seventy six. But though this was interesting and he developed
a distribution formula to arrive at these numbers, it was
also a good bit of guesswork. It was in reference
(26:07):
to this that I saw someone in right Lake. He
did a bit too much smoothing. He also noted that
this isn't a precise model, but quote that the numbers
following are practically near enough to the truth. Men do
not die in exact proportion nor infractions. Working from that table,
he described the population in percentages, stating that quote it
(26:28):
follows also that of all which have been conceived, there
are now alive forty percent above sixteen years old, twenty
five above twenty six years old, et ce. Grant's book,
relaying all this information and the ways he had used
the basic bills of mortality to extrapolate a numerical assessment
of London, was only ninety seven pages long, but it
(26:51):
had a massive impact. He submitted fifty copies of his
book to the Royal Society for members to read. He
had also dedicated the book to the President of the
Royal Society, Sir Robert Moray, which was a really a
stup move. Physician doctor Daniel Whistler nominated Grant for membership
in the Society. This was a pretty unusual situation and
(27:13):
it shows just how important the Society thought his work was.
Grant wasn't a scientist, and he wasn't from the aristocracy.
He was a tradesman who hadn't attended a university, so
not at all the kind of person who was expected
to be a member of the Royal Society. But the
Royal Society was also quite new, having been founded in
sixteen sixty, so it wasn't as though his nomination broke
(27:36):
decades of tradition. King Charles the Scond supported his application
and made a statement that if the Royal Society found
any more tradesmen like Grant, they should admit them as well.
Grant was indeed made a fellow. He published several editions
in the following years, updating the tables each time he
(27:57):
learned new information that led to refined numbers. He notated
the ways he had estimated things incorrectly in earlier versions,
like supposing that households had an average of eight people
when five was really more accurate. Because of all of
this work, Grant is frequently called the father of demography,
(28:18):
so anytime someone is referencing demographics, they're referencing his work,
at least indirectly. Other prominent thinkers of Grant's day were
influenced by his work and continued it or adapted it
into their own fields. France began its own similar record keeping.
After Grant's work became known and his friend Sir William
(28:38):
Petty used the example Grant had set to start looking
at the ways that death related to economic loss within
a community. He published his work Essays in Political Arithmetic
and Political Survey or Anatomy of Ireland in sixteen seventy two,
after building on the work that Grant had done in London.
That work launched a wave of probability mathematic and while
(29:00):
its flaws are recognized, the concepts of it are still
in use today. Just three years after Grant's book was
first published, London experienced a surgeon plague, which is commonly
known as the Great Plague of sixteen sixty five. Grant's
updated numbers regarding the size of the population that year,
which he thought maxed out at four hundred and sixty thousand,
(29:22):
is one of the only ways to really know today
just how impactful the death toll was that is usually
estimated to be around one hundred thousand people over the
course of a year and a half. In sixteen sixty six,
London experienced the Great Fire and Grant was hit very
hard by it. His house in a shop burned down.
(29:43):
Petty helped finance the rebuilding of Grant's home, but he
never really financially recovered and he had to sell his
remaining property, some of it to Petty, and he may
have declared bankruptcy. This is another thing that the Aubrey
account says, but there's no documentation to back it up. However,
a lot of documents were destroyed in that fire, and
(30:05):
Grant's work is some of the only way that we
know about numbers in London at the time, because everything
else burned. But Grant and Petty started to have some
disagreements over money that really shifted the dynamic of their
friendship at this time. During this time of uncertainty, Grant
became a Roman Catholic, and this was an unusual and
unpopular move during this time in England. Refusing to attend
(30:30):
Anglican services was considered a statutory offense. The conversion really
took a toll on what was left of his friendship
with Petty. Petty wrote to Grant in January of sixteen
seventy three, quote, as for differences in religion, you have
done a miss in sundry particulars which I need not mention,
(30:50):
because yourself may easily conjecture my meetings. However, we leave
these things to God and be mindful of what is
the sum of all religion, and of what is and
ever was true religion all the world over. Petty also
confided in a letter to a friend soon after, quote,
Captain Grant is now an open and zealous champion for popery.
(31:13):
Wherefore I have not so much intimacy with him as formerly.
We mentioned earlier in the episode that Grant was part
of an infrastructure project that brought water into the city.
That work was done by the New River Company, at
which Grant was in a managerial position. His Catholicism caused
(31:34):
so many problems and was so despised by many Londoners
that a rumor started that he had been, perhaps somehow
to blame for the Great Fire, and that he had
prevented water from reaching the city to douse the flames
as part of being in this role, and this actually
got him in legal trouble, although he was ultimately found
to have done no such thing. He actually was not
(31:55):
in that managerial position until after the fire had taken place.
Although his innocence on that matter had been proven, his
status as a Catholic continued to isolate him professionally and socially.
He was called before the court twice on the charge
of recusancy failing to attend Anglican church, and he pled
(32:16):
not guilty. His case was scheduled for trial and if
he was found guilty, his property would be seized by
the Crown, but that trial never happened. In the early
sixteen seventies, Grant developed liver disease. He died on April eighteenth,
seventeen sixty four before his trial date. His cause of
death is given as jaundice. He was buried at Saint
(32:38):
Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street. Although their relationship had suffered,
Petty attended his funeral and was deeply upset. Petty took
care of Grant's widow Mary financially in the years after this,
and now today we have actuaries. Yeah, thanks John Grant.
John Grant is mentioned in the episode that you wrote
(32:59):
about actuarial science. Yes, we love all of the actuaries.
We love it. I have a very fun listener mail
which also mentions and shares flowers. We'll get to it.
This from our listener, Jamie, who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
(33:21):
I just finished your episode on James Braid and wanted
to share my experience with hypnotism. After graduating my high school,
at a party where, among other things, a hypnotist performed,
I was chosen as one of the participants. It was
an interesting experience. I remember a few things. It was
more than a few years ago now for me. I
was aware the whole time, but I just did exactly
(33:43):
what I thought. Like when we were told it was
very cold, I cuddled to the person next to me.
I was told to give a different name every time
the hypnotist asked my name, and it was going good
until he asked my name after someone else's who had
responded sam. My brain supplied the same name. But then
I thought I can't be Sam he is, and so
(34:03):
I said Samantha. My hesitation obviously showed that I was
coming out of it, so that was the end of
my part. While I was open to suggestion, I also
couldn't overcome my own strongly held beliefs. I can't imagine
how the woman whose neck was set to one side
was able to move it through hypnotism. Listen me either anyway.
(34:24):
As a reward for reading through all that, please enjoy
these flowers. In Pella, Iowa, there is a tulip festival.
The town plants thousands of different kinds of tulips, and
driving a few hours to see them in May is
much easier than flying to Amsterdam. I have never seen
so many different kinds, and I hope you enjoy them.
Thanks for all you do. I truly appreciate your show
(34:44):
and the hard work you put into it. And there
are beautiful pictures of tulips. There are some pink ones,
some orange ones, some yellow ones, and some that look black,
which I come up with, And I'm like, will those
grow in Georgia, because maybe I start planning tulips. Listen,
we love a little gothic flower in our house. I
(35:04):
am glad to have gotten Jamie's account of being hypnotized. Yeah,
I realized, I don't think I've ever been hypnotized. And
I'm like, would that work for me? Or would I
be a pain in the Would I be the problem
child that's like this isn't working, that tries to be
a trouble. Yeah. When I was in college, we had
a couple of you know, the things arranged by the
(35:27):
student affairs committee or whatever, like, yeah, whoever was arranging
entertainment on campus, and there were a couple of different
times that there was a hypnotist show, and I always
found it so fascinating what was happening, and then also
was curious of like is this actually staged or is
(35:48):
this really happening? Yeah, which was going on during James
Braid's time as well. Correct. If you would like to
email us to tell us about your experience with hypnotism
or with tulips or your pets or whatever you wish,
you could do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you would like to read the show notes, those
are available at mystonhistory dot com. We put them up
(36:10):
for every episode we do. And if you have not
subscribed to the podcast and you would like to, you
can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(36:31):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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