The question was what had to be fixed before a count of deaths could persuade those who govern. In Graunt's Observations of 1662 the answer is the authority of each category the searchers reported, the meaning of "Aged" and "Infants", the baseline of ordinary years, the christenings as a stand-in for the living, and the correction owed to deaths placed under the wrong name. In the 1858 report it is the ages of comparison, the choice of civilians, the deaths that left the army with discharged men, the months after return from abroad, and the population on which a hospital's rate is reckoned. In both, the decisions are made in the open, inside the text, and the text says whom they serve.
The contribution is a test at the scale of the document. It does not decide between Porter on one side and Desrosières and Scott on the other. It shows a seventeenth-century reader of official counts doing, in one pamphlet, what Porter's account says weak or contested experts do and what Desrosières's account says of statistics bound up with the making of states, and a nineteenth-century report whose method serves one administrative purpose while stating every rule a sceptical official would need. Scott's opposition of state categories to local knowledge helps least with Graunt, whose categories were the searchers' own. Between Cohen and Small, the 1858 report is both persuasion and analysis, and the text alone cannot order the two.
The limits are those of two texts and two modern summaries: one text read only in paraphrase, one record describing a later edition than the text read, and records that carry none of the figures on which the old arguments rest. The ledger's values come from codings of the records, not of the books.
Further research could take three directions. A corrected transcription of the 1858 report, read with its tables, would let its definitions be quoted and checked against its figures. The bills of mortality in later decades, read for when and how the searchers' categories changed, would test whether the conventions Graunt judged hardened into things acted upon. And the parent study's separate record of the hospital at Scutari, not read here, could be set beside the 1858 report's account of the same months.
Appendix: the ledger's values for the two cases
The values below are the parent study's, as the two codings gave them, for the records of the two cases. An unsettled value means the two codings differed.
| Case | act | act kind | act before proof | gap named | count | bearer named | revision in case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graunt's Bills of Mortality | yes | count-or-published-report | not-said | unsettled | unsettled | not-named | named |
| Army Mortality 1858 | yes | count-or-published-report | unsettled | not-named | no-count | unsettled | unsettled |
Agreement between the two codings across all 89 cases, for the cells above: act 75 of 89 (84%); act kind 74 of 89 (83%); act before proof 69 of 89 (78%); gap named 76 of 89 (85%); count 78 of 89 (88%); bearer named 70 of 89 (79%); revision in case 67 of 89 (75%).
Among the 23 cases the parent study reads closely, act kind was count-or-published-report for 4, and the count cell read: no-count 10; unsettled 5; qualified-by-definition-scope-or-denominator 5; settled 2; provisional-or-revised 1.
The study's second hypothesis (E2: in most cases that give a count, the case's own text qualifies it, as provisional or revised, or by a definition, a scope or a denominator, rather than giving it as settled) was read as unclear on the strict reading (supports 8, against 5, unclear 25, not applicable 51; share 62%) and as supported on the lenient reading (supports 8, against 5, unclear 11, not applicable 65; share 62%). In Skeptron's medicine history (17 cases), E2 was supported on both readings (6 for, 2 against, 4 unclear; 75%). Neither record discussed here contributes a settled count to these figures: the Graunt record's count cell is unsettled and the Army Mortality 1858 record's is no-count.
The parent study's test of whether a record lets a later reader judge an act in its own time (a public act; a named gap between the event and its record; who bore the wait named; what would change the reading named) passed in 1 of 36 cases (3%). From the cells above, neither of these two records meets all four conditions: Graunt's bearer cell is not-named, and Army Mortality 1858's gap cell is not-named.