Death In London Research Articles

«…Wishing to Take Due Precaution… and to Preserve the Honour and Decency of the Same City»: the Problem of the Sanitary Condition of 14th Century London and Attempts to Solve it

The article examines the problem of inadequate sanitary condition of the English capital in the 14th century and the attempts taken by official authorities – royal and municipal – to solve it, incl. against the backdrop of a plague epidemic. Based on the royal orders addressed to the London magistrate and the data from research literature, the author identifies and characterizes the main steps of the Crown and City administrations aimed at correcting the situation, considering, in particular, the history of the creation of two new cemeteries: East and West Smithfield and some controversial issues associated with it, for example, the problem of the authorship of the project, its implementation and the degree of the government’s participation in that. Estimates of the number, age and gender composition of the victims of the Black Death buried here are also provided. The results of the investigation lead the author to the conclusion that, despite its obvious significance, the issue of the neglected sanitary condition of London did not receive a comprehensive solution in the century under review, since it became relevant only if a critical level risked being reached, when, due to objective reasons, it could no longer be ignored. This also determined the impossibility of developing those few measures taken into a full-fledged state policy. At the same time, the need for changes in the field of municipal hygiene, aggravated by the epidemic, contributed to the intensification of public initiative, supported or directed by the monarch. Thus, a new impetus was given to the dialogue between the royal and municipal authorities in the development and implementation of a unified sanitation policy. In addition, addressing the topic under consideration is of great practical importance for reconstructing the picture of the daily life of a medieval city in an emergency and its preparedness for such trials making it possible to clarify the scale of the Black Death in London.

#5056 REGIONAL VARIATION IN COVID-19 HOSPITALISATION AND OUTCOMES IN ADULTS IN ENGLAND

Abstract Background and Aims The possibility that population demographic characteristics, changes in viral strain and therapeutic advances in management of COVID-19 might influence clinical outcomes is of great interest given potential regional variations. The aim of our study was to describe regional variation in COVID-19 hospitalisation rates in England and factors affecting in-hospital mortality as well as acute kidney injury (AKI). Method In this retrospective cohort study using hospital episode statistics, we collected data from all adult hospitalised patients with COVID-19 infection (diagnostic code U07.1 in any of the 20 diagnoses codes) between 1st March 2020 and 31st March 2021, to end of discharge period. We also extracted all available secondary diagnoses and procedure codes. Patients with codes for chronic dialysis were excluded. We divided the observation period as per the dominant SARS CoV-2 variant and further, in relation to publication of the RECOVERY trial. SARS CoV-2 “Other” strain was prevalent between 1st March 2020 and 21st December 2020 and “Alfa” between 22nd December 2020 to 17th May 2021. The end date of each phase was based on more than 50% decline in each variant. Results We extracted 3,24,748 finished consultant episodes (FCE) for all patients with U071 code in any of the 20 diagnoses codes and admitted during the study period. After exclusion of multiple FCEs within same spell, chronic RRT and patients not residing in England, there were 749,844 unique admission spells with ICD10 code of U071 in one of the diagnoses codes in 337,029 patients. London had the highest number of COVID-19 admissions at 131,338 (18%) followed by North-west region with 122,683 admissions (16%). Population incidence of COVID-19 hospital admissions was highest in North-west at 21,167 per million population (pmp) and lowest in South-west at 9,292 admissions pmp. Patients with COVID-19 were younger (67.0 ± 17.7 years) in London as compared to patients in East of England (72.2 ± 16.8 years). Length of stay was lowest in North-east (12.2 ± 14.9 days) and highest in North-west (15.2 ± 17.9 days). As compared to London, all eight regions had higher odds of death, ranging from OR of 1.04 (95% CI 1.00, 1.07) in South-west to OR 1.24 (95% CI 1.21, 1.28) in North-west. Odds of death were lower in patients with COVID-19 in post-RECOVERY period, both with “Other” (OR 0.72, 95% CI 0.71, 0.74) and Alfa strain of SARS CoV-2 (OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.74, 0.76). Overall, AKI incidence was 30.3%. All eight regions in England had lower odds of developing AKI as compared to London. Post-RECOVERY periods with the “Other” variant (OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.85, 0.88) and “Alfa variant (OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.86, 0.88) both had lower odds of developing AKI. Conclusion This large national study of COVID-19 found a higher hospital admission rate and AKI incidence but lower odds of death in London compared with other regions in England. The incidence of AKI and mortality due to any cause were lower in the post-RECOVERY period irrespective of the prevalent SARS CoV-2 strain.

Jenkin Thomas Philipps, Every Inch a Welshman and a Poet Moreover

Jenkin Thomas Philipps (d. 1755) is not a particularly well-known Welshman. He is remembered as 'a highly accomplished linguist' and as a private tutor, by 1726, to the children of George II, including William Augustus, duke of Cumberland (1721–65) and Mary (1723–72). On 13 November 1732 he was appointed historiographer royal, a position he retained until his death in London on 22 February 1755. His date of birth is given as 1675 in a library catalogue in Basel, but the source for this information is unclear. In his will he left £60 a year towards the maintenance of a free school in his native parish Llansawel, Carmarthenshire, but he died without signing the will.<br/> The post of historiographer royal was a sinecure given either to keep the candidate quiet or to supplement an otherwise insufficient stipend. The latter was likely the case when Philipps was appointed 'historiographer to his Majesty' four days after the death of his predecessor, Robert Stephens. It secured him an income of ?200 per annum. In addition to his teaching activities and this appointment, Philipps managed to author and edit a considerable number of works in various languages, but he is not known as an author in Welsh. So it is a surprise to find a poem by him in what must have been his first language. The search to give some context to this poem reveals a few hitherto unknown facts about his life and adds to the list of his known publications.

Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866 to 1965

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.

Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866-1965

Using weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our results show that both warm and cold weeks were associated with elevated mortality in the late 19th-century, but heat effects, due mainly to infant deaths from digestive diseases, largely disappeared after WWI. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths–equal to 0.8-1.3 percent of all deaths–were averted. Our findings also indicate that a series of hot years in the 1890s substantially changed the timing of the infant mortality decline in London.

Sex differences in adult famine mortality in medieval London.

Recurrent famine events during the medieval period might have contributed to excess mortality during the Black Death in London, England (c. 1349-1350). Previous research using conventional methods of age estimation revealed that adult males experienced lower risks of mortality under "normal" (attritional) but not famine mortality conditions following the Black Death. However, given the biases inherent in conventional age estimation methods, this study reassesses sex differences in risks of medieval adult famine mortality using ages estimated via transition analysis, which avoids some of the limitations of conventional age estimation methods. We apply hazards analysis (the Gompertz model of adult mortality) to ages estimated for human skeletal remains (n = 1245) from London cemeteries dated to the pre-Black Death (c. 1000-1250 CE) and post-Black Death (c. 1350-1540 CE) periods. The results reveal no sex differences in risks of mortality before the Black Death but indicate that adult males faced lower risks of mortality after the Black Death during conditions of normal and famine mortality. These findings largely support those of our previous research, which suggested that selective mortality during the Black Death or sex-biased improvements in standard of living following the epidemic reduced risk of mortality for adult males in the post-Black Death period under normal mortality conditions. However, the use of transition analysis age estimates also revealed a reduced risk of mortality for post-Black Death adult males under famine conditions.

Mary McCarthy and Cecylia Wojewoda: The Story of a Friendship

Abstract This article describes the friendship between Mary McCarthy, the American writer of fiction and essays, and Cecylia Wojewoda, her Polish translator. In her youth, Wojewoda was an aspiring poet and playwright; later she became a respected translator of Anglo-American literature (especially theater). The two women first met in Warsaw in 1959. The author, McCarthy’s son, describes, with ample citations from the correspondence, a warm and complex relationship, which transcended factual matters associated with translation. He evokes the give-and-take in this “marriage of true minds,” the two principals’ erudition, and their shared love of Shakespeare. A tie of mutual sympathy kept the friendship going until McCarthy’s death in 1989. The article sheds light on Wojewoda’s earlier life, including a harrowing time in Slovakia in 1944, during the Slovak uprising against the Nazis, and her husband Bolesław’s premature death in London two years later.

Espials (Xtofer Marlowe in London)

Abstract Niall McDevitt and Simon King’s joint Poetopography/Walkative explorations of Christopher Marlowe’s life and death in London prove the starting point for McDevitt’s retelling of the Marlowe myth and its astonishing relevance to the major issues of today. Two sites in particular – the Dutch Church in Broadgate where an anti-immigrant verse diatribe signed ‘Tamburlaine’ was pinned to the door on 5 May 1593, and Deptford Strand where Marlowe was murdered on 30 May 1593 and where the inquest took place two days later – prove especially mind-boggling. Many Marlovians believe there was a cover-up; and the tragic loss of one of the most brilliant poets in English literature still festers. The terrain cries for redress. A Los Angeles parallelogram is erected with the help of occasional allusions to Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe, named after the Elizabethan poets Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. King chose the novel Farewell My Lovely as bibliomantic aid, the title of which seemed suitably elegiac, and which also furnished a succinct phrase to describe the general methodology of this book: leg art. We are all Marlowes, literary gumshoes.

Abstract TP170: Social Deprivation and Stroke Severity at Presentation: Data From a London Teaching Hospital

Background: Stroke is the most common cause of adult disability and the second most common cause of death in London, United Kingdom. Social deprivation has been demonstrated to be an important risk factor for stroke. It is unclear whether individuals from a lower socioeconomic background suffer more severe strokes. In this study we aim to investigate the relationship between social deprivation and stroke severity at presentation to hospital. Method: Data was prospectively collected on all patients presenting to a London tertiary stroke centre between 1 st February 2014 and 1 st March 2017. Stroke severity on presentation to the emergency department was measured by the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS). This data was linked using the patient’s zip code to the UK government’s published index of multiple deprivation decile (IMDD) - 1 st decile being most deprived, 10 th decile being least deprived. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were performed to evaluate the association between social deprivation and stroke severity. Results: Data was available for all 2514 patients that presented between 1 st February 2014 and 1 st March 2017. The median IMDD was 3. There was an association with an increase in IMDD and increasing age at presentation (p<0.05 OR 1.48), decreasing prevalence of hypertension (p<0.05 OR 0.93) and decreasing prevalence of diabetes (p<0.05 OR 0.88). Adjusting for patient characteristics and time from onset of symptoms to presentation to hospital, there was an association with an increase in IMDD and lower NIHSS at presentation to hospital (p<0.05 OR 0.76). Conclusion: The patients that presented to our hospital during this study were more likely to be from a deprived area. Despite being younger, patients from more deprived areas were observed to have higher rates of hypertension and diabetes compared with patients from less deprived areas, and this should be the subject of targeted intervention in primary care. In our analyses, deprivation was associated with a more severe clinical presentation of stroke. This finding may contribute to worse outcomes following stroke in patients from more deprived areas, and the factors underlying this relationship should be investigated further.

Eliot, All in Prose

The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot is the first attempt to put all of Eliot’s printed prose in one place, from his adolescent writing in St. Louis in 1905 to his death in London in 1965. With two volumes released, amounting to nearly 2,000 pages, The Complete Prose represents an extraordinary undertaking. Each piece has been edited and annotated by an international team of Eliot scholars and may be accessed digitally. All of works have been converted into downloadable, fully searchable PDFs and uploaded into user-friendly tables of contents. The Complete Prose will benefit Eliot scholars and readers for a long time to come.

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in theNew Negro World, 1940–1944

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the<i>New Negro World</i>, 1940–1944

Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones

‘Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones’ first investigates how the Noh came to influence Yeats, then analyzes Yeats's Four Plays for Dancers, focusing on The Dreaming of the Bones, and explains how this Yeats play is adapted into a new Noh play, Hone-no-Yume, in which the places, names and situations were changed to Japanese ones. An account is then given of the latter's production. Fenolossa came to Japan with an appointment to teach Ethics and Logic at the University of Tokyo in 1987, where he studied Noh with Minoru Umewaka, a Noh master. He also translated some Noh plays with the help of his students. After his death in London, his manuscripts were handed over to Ezra Pound by his second wife, Mary, and it is through Pound that Yeats came to read them. Inspired by them Yeats wrote Four Plays for Dancers. At the Hawk’s Well was later translated into two different Noh plays by Mario Yokomichi, thus completing the circle from Japan to Ireland and back.

Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665

This article uses individual records of 930,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly through time. Tracking the weekly spread of plague, we find no evidence that plague emerged first in the docks, and in many cases elevated mortality emerges first in the poor northern suburbs. Looking at the seasonal pattern of mortality, we find that the characteristic autumn spike associated with plague continued into the early 1700s. Natural increase improved as smaller crises disappeared after 1590, but fewer than half of those born survived childhood.

The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarcheological Analyses of Epidemic Cemeteries

Most research on historic plague has relied on documentary evidence, but recently researchers have examined the remains of plague victims to produce a deeper understanding of the disease. Bioarcheological analysis allows the skeletal remains of epidemic victims to bear witness to the contexts of their deaths. This is important for our understanding of the experiences of the vast majority of people who lived in the past, who are not typically included in the historical record. This paper summarizes bioarcheological research on plague, primarily investigations of the Black Death in London (1349–50), emphasizing what anthropology uniquely contributes to plague studies.

Epidemiology’s 350th Anniversary

Between 1600 and 1700, sudden, profound, and multifarious changes occurred in philosophy, science, medicine, politics, and society. In an extremely convulsed century, these profound and convergent upheavals produced the equivalent of a cultural big bang, which opened a new domain of knowledge acquisition based on population thinking and group comparisons. In 1662, when John Graunt applied-for the first time-the new approach to the analysis of causes of death in London, he gave epidemiology a singular date of birth. This was exactly 350 years ago.

Living Standards and Plague in London, 1560-1665

We use individual records of 920,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly through time. Tracking the weekly spread of plague before 1665 we find a consistent pattern of elevated mortality spreading from the same northern suburbs. Looking at the seasonal pattern of mortality, we find that the characteristic autumn spike associated with plague continued into the early 1700s. Given that individual cases of plague and typhus are frequently indistinguishable, claims that plague suddenly vanished after 1665 should be treated with caution. Natural increase improved as smaller plagues disappeared after 1590, but fewer than half of those born survived childhood.

Stature and frailty during the Black Death: the effect of stature on risks of epidemic mortality in London, A.D. 1348–1350

Recent research has shown that preexisting health condition affected an individual's risk of dying during the 14th-century Black Death. However, a previous study of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality during the epidemic failed to find a relationship between the two; this result is perhaps surprising given the well-documented inverse association between stature and mortality in human populations. We suggest that the previous study used an analytical approach that was more complex than was necessary for an assessment of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality. This study presents a reanalysis of data on adult stature and age-at-death during the Black Death in London, 1348–1350 AD. The results indicate that short stature increased risks of mortality during the medieval epidemic, consistent with previous work that revealed a negative effect of poor health on risk of mortality during the Black Death. However, the results from a normal, non-epidemic mortality comparison sample do not show an association between stature and risks of mortality among adults under conditions of normal mortality. Fisher's exact tests, used to determine whether individuals who were growing during the Great Famine of 1315–1322 were more likely to be of short stature than those who did not endure the famine, revealed no differences between the two groups, suggesting that the famine was not a source of variation in stature among those who died during the Black Death.

Age patterns of mortality during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349–1350

This paper examines adult age-specific mortality patterns of one of the most devastating epidemics in recorded history, the Black Death of A.D. 1347–1351. The goal was to determine whether the epidemic affected all ages equally or if it targeted certain age groups. Analyses were done using a sample of 337 individuals excavated from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, which contains only individuals who died during the Black Death in London in 1349–1350. The age patterns from East Smithfield were compared to a sample of 207 individuals who died from non-epidemic causes of mortality. Ages were estimated using the method of transition analysis, and age-specific mortality was evaluated using a hazards model. The results indicate that the risk of mortality during the Black Death increased with adult age, and therefore that age had an effect on risk of death during the epidemic. The age patterns in the Black Death cemetery were similar to those from the non-epidemic mortality sample. The results from this study are consistent with previous findings suggesting that despite the devastating nature of the Black Death, the 14th-century disease had general patterns of selectivity that were similar to those associated with normal medieval mortality.

The contribution of genital tract sepsis to maternal deaths in London

BackgroundGenital tract sepsis (GTS) caused 4% of maternal deaths in the UK in the last Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (2003–2005) report. A large proportion of women in...

210Po Log-normal distribution in human urines: Survey from Central Italy people

The death in London of the former secret service agent Alexander Livtinenko on 23 November 2006 generally attracted the attention of the public to the rather unknown radionuclide 210Po. This paper presents the results of a monitoring programme of 210Po background levels in the urines of noncontaminated people living in Central Italy (near the Republic of S. Marino). The relationship between age, sex, years of smoking, number of cigarettes per day, and 210Po concentration was also studied. The results indicated that the urinary 210Po concentration follows a surprisingly perfect Log-normal distribution. Log 210Po concentrations were positively correlated to age (p < 0.0001), number of daily smoked cigarettes (p = 0.006), and years of smoking (p = 0.021), and associated to sex (p = 0.019). Consequently, this study provides upper reference limits for each sub-group identified by significantly predictive variables.