Dumb Ways to Die: Printed Ephemera

Summary

Dumb Ways to Die began as an Australian rail safety campaign back in 2012. I heard the viral jingle recently, and it got me to thinking about a particular kind of printed ephemera. From about 1530, London began to publish Bills of Mortality. By the close of the same century, these lists of deaths and their causes were published weekly. Every time someone died, the parish church rang its bell, and the sexton, responsible for preparing graves, alerted ‘searchers,’ not doctors but typically older women whose job it was to determine cause of death.* They then passed on their findings to the Parish Clerks’ Company Hall, whose job it was to collate and publish the data. A Bills of Mortality for February 21–28, 1664. Wellcome Collection. A collection of London’s Bills of Mortality for 1665, a plague year — with a lovely and subject-appropriate four-piece Memento mori woodcut border. With an estimated weekly circulation of 5000 to 6000 copies in the early seventeenth century, Bills of Mortality were pretty popular.* But why were they printed? That mortality data should be gathered is obvious enough, but the fact that they were printed and sold for a penny apiece in relatively large numbers shows that there was a profit to be made out of people’s morbid curiosity — something not entirely unique to the seventeenth century. Spread from Graunt, J., Natural and political observations mentioned in a following index, and made upon the Bills of mortality, 1662 Some of the diseases may sound unfamiliar. Dropsie, or dropsy, is a now obsolete term for edema (swelling), not a disease as such but typically a symptom of an underlying disease. In seventeenth-century London — and for that matter most other places — teeth were a leading cause of death, owing to poor oral hygiene and no effective means to treat infections at a time when extractions — without anesthesia — were performed by the local barber. Read any historical novel, and someone is likely dying of consumption (tuberculosis or...