Abstract

Two printed works stand near the beginning of the habit of arguing about public health with counts of the dead: John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662) and the reprint of 1858, Mortality of the British Army, at Home and Abroad, and during the Russian War, whose title page names no author and which is usually credited to Florence Nightingale. This article asks what had to be fixed in each before a count of deaths could be put to those who governed: which definitions of a death and its cause, and which denominators. It reads Graunt at length and word for word, and the 1858 description of the army's diagrams in close paraphrase, since its only available text is uncorrected machine reading. Beside each it sets the modern summary that Skeptron, a history studio of the RISCON family, wrote of the case. The question joins a debate in the history of quantification: Theodore Porter treats counting rules as a substitute for personal trust; Alain Desrosières and James Scott treat counts as conventions and simplifications made with and for states; Ian Hacking ties the categories of counting to what came to be counted. Both works settle their definitions openly, inside the text, while naming the persons they hope to persuade. Graunt accepts the searchers' coarse categories where his purposes allow and corrects the plague count against ordinary years; the 1858 report rests on matched ages, chosen comparison populations and a correction for men discharged to die as civilians. The modern summaries keep the warnings about denominators but none of the figures.