John Graunt

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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,

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.