John Graunt Research Articles

Lessons from John Graunt

Lessons from John Graunt

Gender, health, and Ill-health

This paper addresses a seeming paradox. Why is it that women in most industrialized societies live many years longer than men when available health indicators suggest that women have more ill-health than men?’ Concern about the level of morbidity (or is it the greater use of the health dollar?) has led governments to identify women as an at risk population and to policy initiatives such as the National Women’s Health Policy in Australia. MORTALITY Women’s greater longevity has been noted since 1662 when John Graunt, an Englishman, analyzed weekly reports of deaths in the parishes of London and noticed that the proportional deaths of women were below those of men.2 In the last century, in developed countries, there has been a marked increase in life expectancy at birth (more than 20 years). Similarly, there have been significant increases in life expectancy at older ages. The increased longevity has been greater for women than for men. In Australia the difference in life expectancy widened from 3.6 years at the beginning of the century, to 7.1 years in 1980 and has since narrowed to 6.4 years.” It is possible that the erosion of women’s longevity advantage reflects women’s changing lifestyles and work patterns. Even in developing societies, by and large, women outlive men, save for the experience in some countries (notably the Indian subcontinent) where, during early life and during the reproductive years, women’s social status may seriously threaten life chances and jeopardize their access to necessary health services. Education of girls (even a few years) plays a crucial role in increasing life expectancy in developing countries. A much reduced life expectancy is also seen for indigenous people, for example the Australian aborigines, reflecting even greater social inequities. Progress in life expectancy is often attributed to a multitude of factors. Examples are the significant reductions in infant mortality and in mortality

A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750

The book and its relation to other works a sketch of the background in mathematics and natural philosophy early concepts of probability and chance Cardano and Liber de Ludo Aleae, 1657 John Graunt and the observations made upon the Bills of Morality, 1662 the probabilistic interpretation of Graunt's life table the early history of life insurance mathematics mathematical models and statistical methods in astronomy the Newtonian Revolution in mathematics and science miscellaneous contributions between 1657 and 1708 the great leap forward, 1708-1718 - a survey new solutions of old problems, 1708-1718 James Bernoulli and Ars Conjectandi, 1713 Bernoulli's theorem tests of significance based on sex ratio at birth and the binomial distribution, 1710-1713 Montmort and the Essay d`Analyse sur les Jeux de Hazard, 1708 and 1713 the problem of coincidences and the compound probability theorem the problem of the duration of play, 1708-1718 Nicholas Bernoulli De Moivre and the Doctrine of Chances, 1718, 1738 and 1756.

Asthma in childhood, 1938-1988. From zero to "modernity" in 50 years.

The Rickets is a new disease, both as to name and thing…John Graunt, 1620–1674 (quoted by D.J. Boorstin in The Discoverers: New York, Random House, 1983, p 668)

Control of infection on the two sides of the Atlantic

One of the most crucial tests of the hospital epidemiologist is the speed and skill with which he controls an outbreak. By definition an epidemic is an unusually large cluster vvhich is measured statistically as a significantly increased rate (PGO.05) above that of the background of endemic occurrence. Epidemics occur at a rate of approximately one per 10,000 admissions and account for less than 5% of all nosocomial infections (Wenzel et al., 1983; IIaley et al., 1985). However, they are emotionally charged events vvhich can lead to serious medical, legal and administrative liability. It, therefore, seems reasonable to review the control of epidemics in the USA and Europe. There are well recognized differences in approach to inv’estigating epidemics on the two sides of the Atlantic. ‘I’he Europeans favour a laboratory-based initiative where the medically qualified microbiologist starts epidemiological investigations following recognition of a problem from laboratory-based surveillance. The Americans, in contrast, often prefer to have a ward-based epidemiological approach from the outset. There is no evidence that either course is more efficient or efficacious, and both groups appear to be listening to the advantages of the complementary disciplines. If tradition counts, however, it seems that the English have all the advantages: not only microbiology but also statistics and epidemiology developed early in the UK. To begin with vital statistics was born in 1662 with the publication of the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt, a brilliant London merchant with no formal background in mathematics. In 1837 William Farr, who was the first director of the general registrar’s oflice, lifted vital statistics to a new era with his refined definitions and classifications of death rates by age, sex, region and disease. In the 19th century, Karl Pearson founded the field of biometry. In the face of such strength the bias toward the microbiological probably reflects the strong position of bacteriology in the teaching hospitals and the supply of medically qualified microbiologists to general service hospitals. Perhaps it is fair to suggest that the traditions of bacteriology and of statistics-epidemiology in the UK developed like two species in separate environments, not yet merging for sufficient time to develop a successful symbiosis. There are indications that the timing is right to test the union of microbiology and epidemiology in infection control. The Hospital Infection

Occupational mortality.

Mortality statistics have been formally collected in the United Kingdom since the time of John Graunt in 1692. The advent of birth and death registration in 1839 established a reliable system of mortality rate calculations. Occupation was added to the sixth decennial census in 1851, and supplementary occupational mortality reports have been published since that date. The usefulness of these decennial supplements as hypothesis-generating exercises is reviewed. Particular emphasis is placed on the validity of the standardized mortality ratio as an index of comparative mortality. Flaws in the collection and recording of causes of death and occupational status at death and during life are noted, and the ways in which standard reporting of these events could be improved are outlined.

A PLEA TO GIVE WEAKLY CHILDREN A FAIR CHANCE BY WILLIAM FARR (1865)

William Far (1807-1883) ranks with John Graunt (1620-1674) for his contributions to medical statistics. He was the first to express mathematically the rise and fall of epidemic disease by applying statistical methods to epidemiology. That he also had a deep concern for the frail and premature infant is evident in the following plea directed toward the medical audience. Great qualities of soul are often hidden in the frail child. One Christmas day a premature posthumous son was born in England of such an extremely diminutive size, and apparently of so perishable a frame, that two women who were sent to Lady Pakenham at North Witham, to bring some medicine to strengthen him, did not expect to find him alive on their return. He would inevitably have been consigned to the caverns of Taygetus if the two women had carried him to Spartan tryers. As it was, the frail boy grew up into Newton, lived more than four-score years, and revealed to mankind the laws of the universe. If he had perished, England would not have been what it is in the world. In Paris one evening a puny child in a neat little basket was picked up: he had been left at the church door, the commissary of police was about to carry him to the foundling hospital, when a glazier's wife exclaimed: "You will kill the child in your hospital, give him to me; I have no children, I will take care of him." She cherished her boy, poor as she was, until some one, perhaps his father, settled a small annuity on his life, with which he was educated at the Mazarin College, where he displayed the early genius of a Pascal: it was D'Alembert, to whom we are indebted for a new calculus, for the grand introduction to the Cyclopaedia, and for innumerable physical discoveries.

The rise and fall of epidemiology, 1950--2000 A.D.

IN 1662 John Graunt, a London haberdasher, published his magnum opus, Natural and Political Observations... Made upon the Bills of Mortality, and thereby established the field of epidemiology.1 Graunt brought to light a diversity of facts about human life and disease that had not previously been appreciated. He was the first to notice that the numbers of births and deaths of males exceeded those of females (by the ratio of 14 to 13); he noticed, too, that despite their greater mortality, men had less morbidity than women. Graunt quantified for the first time the high mortality in children, noting that . . .

Early uses of Graunt's life table

The first life table was a brilliant ‘guesstimate’ by John Graunt (1662) based on mortality data analysed by cause of death but not by age or sex. It was over thirty years before Halley (1693) constructed a table to show “the odds that there is, that a Person of that [any] Age does not die in a Year”. In the meantime several writers tried to use Graunt's figures to make deductions about probabilities of death. This note is a description of these efforts.

The age pattern of mortality

The development of a ‘law of mortality’, a mathematical expression for the graduation of the age pattern of mortality, has been of interest since the development of the first life tables by John Graunt (1662) and Edmund Halley (1693). Although Abraham De Moivre proposed a very simple law as early as 1725 the best known early contribution is probably that of Benjamin Gompertz (1825). Since World War II mathematical formulae have been used to graduate sections of the English Life Tables, as well as assured lives mortality, and pensioner and annuitant mortality. Reviews of attempts at finding the ‘law of mortality’ have been given by Elston and Benjamin and Haycocks.

Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics

T HE POLITICAL ARITHMETIC of John Graunt and William Petty was predicated on nominalist assumptions about the nature and sources of order in both society and the physical world. Where later statisticians routinely presumed that natural and social phenomena were susceptible to quantitative study only because and insofar as they were ordered by inherent causal laws, Graunt and Petty viewed the world as made up of discrete entities with no intrinsic relations obtaining among them. They regarded causal laws as constructs of the human mind, and they conceived the uses of mathematics in terms of creating order rather than discovering its immanent principles. These presuppositions help to fix political arithmetic's place in the spectrum of English thought during the decades immediately after the Restoration, and they also illuminate the changing social and political significance of important nominalist currents in the natural philosophy of the age. Within the framework of seventeenth-century nominalism, the relations between social order and the order of nature, and between natural and social philosophy, could be construed in several ways. Graunt and Petty stated the issue primarily in methodological terms: quantifying is important because it provides a form of knowledge free from the distorting effects of controversy and conflict; and the natural philosophers' primary claim on our attention is that, as a group, they offer an example of how consensus about explanatory principles and concepts makes for social harmony. Underlying this view was a further argument-that the conditions for social order ultimately must be self-imposed by individuals as well as enforced by public authority. Again natural philosophy provides the compelling example. With its conception of knowledge as the product of a sustained application of human reason to the phenomena of the physical world, and with its emphasis on the industriousness and self-discipline required of experimenters and investigators, the new science represented a form of social practice which in itself would make those who took it up virtuous. This line of argument was frequently incorporated into a broader set of claims which Petty and Graunt do not make. Robert Boyle, for example, found it reasonable to combine a nominalist epistemology with the view that the

Life Table Analysis and Manpower Statistics — A Note

The idea of a life table was first suggested by John Graunt in his Observations on the Bills of Mortality for the City of London, which was published in 1662. A number of these tables were produced in the next century to meet the needs of the growing insurance industry. These companies insured lives and needed to know how long people of various ages could be expected to live to pay premiums or receive benefits.

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries - A Bibliography of Sir William Petty, F.R.S. and of Observations on the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt, F.R.S. By SirGeoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. xviii + 103. £5.50.

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries - A Bibliography of Sir William Petty, F.R.S. and of Observations on the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt, F.R.S. By SirGeoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. xviii + 103. £5.50. - Volume 6 Issue 3

A Bibliography of Sir William Petty, F.R.S. and of

Somewhat neglected because few of his works were published in his lifetime (and some remain unpublished today), Sir William Petty (1623-1687), an early and influential member of the Royal Society, was a seminal figure in the development of economic theory and ideas of social welfare. Early in his career he was professor of anatomy at Oxford, and scattered through his writings are ideas on education of doctors, the role of hospitals in society, and a concept of egalitarianism in medical care prefiguring 19th and 20th century reforms. The Observations on the Bills of Mortality , by John Graunt (1620-1674), was the first serious effort to deal with what has become the study of vital statistics, and Petty assisted Graunt in preparing them for publication, inasmuch as they furnished a useful application of his theory of political arithmetic. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, himself a physician widely admired for his biography of William Harvey

THE EXCESSIVE PROPORTION OF MALE OVER FEMALE DEATHS UNDER THE AGE OF PUBERTY IN PHILADELPHIA BETWEEN 1821 AND 1830

Ever since John Graunt (1620-1674) established the statistical science of epidemiology, physicians have been aware of the greater vulnerability of the male to disease than the female. Graunt also called attention to the excess of males over females at birth; he further commented on the greater mortality rate of the male throughout his life. The following observations upon the mortality of infants and children in Philadelphia were probably the first published in this country to support Graunt's observations: Of the children born in Philadelphia during the ten years included between 1821 and 1830, amounting according to the returns made to the Board of Health, to 66,642; there were 2,496 more males than females. But notwithstanding the males at birth thus exceed the females about 7½ per cent, a reference to the census of 1830, shows that by the fifth year of childhood, the male excesss is reduced to about 5 per cent; and at ten years to only 1 per cent; and that the reduction still going on, the females between the ages of ten and fifteen, exceed the males about 8 per cent; and between fifteen and twenty, 7.3 per cent. Here then we find, that during the early stages of life, there are agencies operating to reduce unduly the proportion of the male sex, and to trace out and identify these, forms a highly interesting subject of inquiry. It has commonly been supposed that the greater exposure of males to accidents furnished a sufficient explanation of their greater mortality. But our inquiry (in 1830) shows the fallacy of this reasoning, the deaths reported under the head of casualties consisting but a small proportion of the whole mortality, in which when burns and scalds are included, the female deaths are found to exceed the male. The truth is that with very few exceptions, all the morbid influences to which the early periods of life are exposed, operate with peculiar fatality among the males, showing unequivocally that the true cause of the disparity resides in some physiological peculiarity.

The Third Royal society nuffield Lecture. Demographic prediction.

The main part of this paper is concerned with the boldest and most comprehensive form of demographic prediction—the forecasting of total populations. That form may be regarded as subsuming many more limited types of prediction. In practice, the method of approach in forecasting total populations has not infrequently been very different from that followed in attempting to predict the behaviour of the specific components of population growth. But conceptually, at least, the prediction of total populations represents an extension of the efforts made since the beginnings of demography to derive order from the data on mortality and fertility. Such order has often been found. But attempts to use it as a basis for prediction have not been very successful, and the broader the front the less successful has been the product. Nor are there grounds for believing that long-range, overall predictions are likely to be much more reliable in the future. Nevertheless, the attempts have not been uninstructive. And it is of interest to consider them in a wider historical context—that of the endeavours of demographers to generalize and to discover regularities relating to human populations. These endeavours, which have naturally varied widely in their explicitness, may be grouped under two heads. First, attempts which, generalizing from a particular situation, assumed that the generalization would have a wide applicability, whether or not the absolute levels of fertility or mortality were different. Secondly, generalizations which explicitly included time and change in their framework. Examples of both types are found at various stages in the development of demo­graphy. One example is indeed already present in John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations , the first specifically demographic publication—an attempt to formulate what later came to be referred to as the ̒law of mortality’ (1)*.

John Graunt and his Natural and political observations

I. Some notes on the life of John Graunt In commemorating the work of Graunt, the founder of demography, it was clearly desirable that a search be made for further information on his life. Perhaps the most striking result of that search has been to show how heavily we must still depend for our knowledge of Graunt as a person on Aubrey’s notes (I)—both in their original form and in their more elegant elaboration by Anthony Wood (2)—and on the brief but warm comment by another of Graunt’s contemporaries, the famous book-collector, Richard Smyth. ‘An understanding man’, Smyth called him, ‘of a quick witt and a pretty schollar, my old acquantaince’ (3). Hull added a few facts (4), and there are some interesting snatches of correspondence from Petty to, or about, Graunt in Lord Lansdowne’s volume (5). These remain basic sources. But additional material has been found elsewhere—in the City of London Records and in the records of the Drapers’ Company, as well as in the full Petty correspondence from which Lord Lansdowne cited a few sentences. The contribution of these and other sources will be seen as the story is pieced together (6).

John Graunt and his Natural and political observations

In commemorating the work of Graunt, the founder of demography, it was clearly desirable that a search be made for further information on his life. Perhaps the most striking result of that search has been to show how heavily we must still depend for our knowledge of Graunt as a person on Aubrey’s notes (1)*—both in their original form and in their more elegant elaboration by Anthony Wood (2)—and on the brief but warm comment by another of Graunt’s contemporaries, the famous book-collector, Richard Smyth. 'An understanding man’, Smyth called him, ‘of a quick witt and a pretty schollar, my old aequantaince.’(3) Hull added a few facts, (4) and there are some interesting snatches of correspondence from Petty to, or about, Graunt in Lord Lansdowne’s volume. (5) These remain basic sources. But additional material has been found elsewhere—in the City of London Records and in the records of the Drapers’ Company, as well as in the full Petty correspondence from which Lord Lansdowne cited a few sentences. The contribution of these and other sources will be seen as the story is pieced together. (6) John Graunt was born on 24 April 1620, the son of Henry and Mary Graunt. According to Aubrey, Henry Graunt was a Hampshire man by birth. But he had been apprenticed in London in 1604 (when he was 12 years old) and was admitted to the Freedom of the Drapers’ Company in 1614. He was described as a collar maker, first in Abchurch Lane and later in Birchin Lane, in the parish of St Michael Cornhill, (7) where his children were born. The register of St Michael suggests a large family—seven children at least, including a set of twins—with John Graunt appearing to be the eldest, or at least the first of his family to be baptized in that parish. (8)

Tercentenary of John Graunt's ‘Natural and Political Observations’: The Royal Society Meetings

Tercentenary of John Graunt's ‘Natural and Political Observations’: The Royal Society Meetings

John Graunt: A Tercentenary Tribute

John Graunt was a London draper who, three hundred years ago, published some Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality. These observations represent the first, and an extremely competent, attempt to draw scientific conclusions from statistical data. The present study illustrates Graunt's careful scientific approach, his ability to extract the essence from what by modern standards are distinctly untrustworthy demographic data, and his intuitive appreciation of the amount of interpretation his findings would stand. Graunt's analysis was largely based upon ratios and proportions of vital events and consideration of the way in which these altered in different circumstances, and is remarkably free of major statistical errors. His statistical understanding was considerable; for example, we owe to him the first scientific estimates of population size, the concept of the life table, the idea of statistical association, the first studies of time series, and a pioneer attempt to draw a representative sample. Graunt's book is well worth reading today, not only for entertainment and instruction, but because it laid the foundations of the science of statistics.