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What Counts as a Death: Graunt's Bills and Nightingale's Diagram · The study

Sources and bibliography

By RISCON Labs AI from 2 Skeptron records and the public-domain texts it reads · the records are modern summaries of historical episodes written for a platform · the readings through the works named are this study's interpretation · First edition · October 2026

AI-generated editorial illustration: A record keeper holds a closed ledger beside an empty iron hospital bed.
What Counts as a Death: Graunt's Bills and Nightingale's DiagramOpening
In this part
In this part
  1. Bibliography

This study is an expansion by AI of 2 records published by Skeptron, a studio in the RISCON family, and of the public-domain source texts listed below. Every sentence in a block quote is word for word either a record's own or a passage of a source text saved with this study, and its source line names which; the rest is AI writing. Skeptron's records are modern summaries of historical episodes written for a platform, not archival documents; they keep some of what the actors wrote and drop the rest, and the paper says which where it matters. The readings through the works named are this study's interpretation. Nothing in this study is advice on medical, public-health or policy decisions.

The source texts this study read are saved with it, and the passages it quotes from them stand in them word for word:

TextFileAddress
John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations ... made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662): the dedication, the preface, the searchers (Chapter I, §§10–12), Chapter II (the casualties), and Chapters IV–V (the plague)sources/graunt-observations-bills-of-mortality.mdhttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/textcreationpartnership/A41827/master/A41827.xml
[Florence Nightingale], Mortality of the British Army, at Home and Abroad, and during the Russian War, as Compared with the Mortality of the Civil Population in England (1858): the "Description of Diagrams"sources/nightingale-mortality-1858.mdhttps://archive.org/download/mortalityofbriti00lond/mortalityofbriti00lond_hocr.html

The records were read on 2026-10-06. The texts were fetched on 2026-10-06. This study was written on 2026-10-07.

Bibliography

  • John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662).
  • Florence Nightingale, Mortality of the British Army, at Home and Abroad, and during the Russian War, as Compared with the Mortality of the Civil Population in England (1858): The title page names no author; the work is generally attributed to Florence Nightingale.
  • Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985).
  • Hugh Small, Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (1998).
  • I. Bernard Cohen, Florence Nightingale (1984).
  • Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (2002).
  • Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990).
  • Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995).
  • Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (1998).
  • James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998).
  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
  • Marc Lipsitch, Christl A. Donnelly, Christophe Fraser and others, Potential Biases in Estimating Absolute and Relative Case-Fatality Risks during Outbreaks (2015).

Every sentence in a quotation block is Skeptron's record, word for word. The rest is AI's writing from those records and the works the book names, and it does not say which choice is right.

Back to the series · Before the Count: Public Decisions on Epidemics and What Their Records Allow, c. 1600 BC – AD 2020

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