JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 464

 Coming on the heels of the only post that I’ve made on teeth is this happy
element, a brief mention of lethal teeth in London in 1665. The listing of the death and
its introduction (if not the actual dead themselves) comes in the form of a
publication called The London Bills of Mortality, which was begun (so it seems)
in 1538.  As an instrument of society the
Bills were more for legal ramifications than for compiling medical
information.  The Bill was a necessary
element for legal burial and the transfer of an estate, composed to make sure
(or for extent possible at this time) that death had indeed occurred and that
the legal course could be enacted to disassemble the accumulated physical life
of the decedent.  The weekly reporting
and compilations must’ve been wearying, and I imagine that this was not the
most auspicious or desirable job to have, wringing in the newly dead.  Death’s accounting procedure grew more
systematized as time wore on, getting a more formal approach as early as
1603.  And it was not in every English parish
that the cause of death was recorded, and the recorders were hardly a army of medical
experts—causes of death were sometimes accurate, sometimes not, sometimes
whimsical and sometimes all or none of the above.

The list below attests to a somewhat poetical bent in the naming of lethal
afflictions; of course most meant something immediate and understandle to the
reader in 1665, though today many of the names seem quire airy and adventurous,
hardly things to actual die of.  The list
comes from the groundbreaking work of London haberdasher and man of
semi-science, John Graunt, who in 1662 published Natural and Political
Observations … on the Bills of Mortality (1662):  it was a tremendously important work and a
foundation stone in statistical applications in health and epidemiology, as
Graunt tried to organize and interpret the collected data. 

Again, my attraction to this all stems from yesterday’s post on the question
of the existence of teeth in the Renaissance—“teeth” is listed as a cause of
death in 39 of these cases, the 6^th leading cause of death among the
39 causes listed.  I guess death might’ve
been caused by a systemic infection caused by a rotten tooth ; or  perhaps the tabulator observed a dead body,
saw a mouthful of bad teeth and nothing else obviously wrong with the body, and
thus dubbed the cause of death as the most heinous looking thing that could be found.

A few of the obscure terms explained:

Ague: 
deep fever
Body Flux: sepsis? 
Childbed: 
a baby or mother who dies during childbirth
Crisoms: 
refers to a white baptisimal robe worn by an infant, meaning that this
was a very young baby born    before baptism occurred.
Dropsie: 
lethal inflammation or edema
French-pox: 
syphilis (called “French” because of a decimating outbreak of teh
disease in the French army.  That, or the
prescribed treatment, which was the ingestion of mercury. 
Headmouldshot: edema of the brain
Imposthume: Abcesses or cysts
Rising of the Lights:  inflammation of the lungs or general lung
problesms
Thrush—an infection of the mouth (especially
in babies).
Tissixk: 
tuberculosis

According to the website Magic-Nation “other causes of death included affrighted, bladder in the throat, breakbone
fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch,
hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s
disease, St. Anthony’s fire, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck”.
Most of these I have little  insight on,
and even though they caused someone’s death, they still have a lilting, lyrical
quality about them.  I particularly like
and am curious about “eel thing”, “milk leg”, and “Stuffing”