1. INTRODUCTION
The revolutionary decades in seventeenth-century England, the 1640s and 1650s, saw profound disturbance and loss of life. But the dismantling of ancien régime structures in church and state also provided unique opportunities for reform and new thinking in areas such as medicine, education and poor relief. Many of the most active reformers were loosely grouped in what is now known as the Hartlib circle, coordinated by the immigrant Londoner Samuel Hartlib and including many physicians and natural philosophers.Footnote 1 Equally, the restoration of Charles II in 1660 required drastic readjustments, which some reformers survived better than others. This article will be particularly concerned with two of these, John Graunt and, to a lesser extent, William Petty, as well as with some of those in opposing camps. Petty was a great survivor; Graunt arguably was not, but as we shall see, he made attempts to conform while trying to retain his own identity.
Graunt was a London citizen and upper tradesman, sometimes still described as ‘humble’. This is essentially misleading, as Graunt was a cultivated man, but what it signifies is Graunt's distance from what we would now call the establishment and from centres of intellectual power such as the universities. Graunt was a pioneering statistician,Footnote 2 the first to analyse the London Bills of Mortality, that is, the official record of burials instituted in the sixteenth century with the aim of detecting levels of danger from plague.Footnote 3 In so doing Graunt revealed for the first time the significance of the massed life events of women and children as well as men. The main purpose of this article is to investigate what Graunt had to say, statistically and otherwise, about the fates of London's children. I would like to argue that too little attention has been paid to one of Graunt's major achievements, the first formulation of an infant mortality rate (IMR). I want also to examine why, having arrived at his IMR, Graunt did not make it the measure of the ‘urban penalty’, the price paid in heightened death rates for making a living in England's teeming metropolis. Graunt was also the first to generalise, in statistical terms, about child death, and the first to reveal to Londoners the major causes of death among their children, as well as the scale of the threat of new diseases. In the latter part of the article I will look at attitudes to children as expressed by other members of the Hartlib circle, and the nature of their interest in areas affecting children and also childbirth. Finally I will suggest that the approach of the Hartlibians, including Graunt, was influenced by highly traditional notions of a gendered division of labour in the care and upbringing of children.
It hardly needs saying that a great deal has been written in recent decades about childhood in early modern England. The notion that early modern English children were not cared about, or cared for, was exploded many years since and there is no need to fight that old battle again here.Footnote 4 Moreover, it has been established, most recently in abundant detail by Hannah Newton, not only that sick children were cared for by their families and the family servants, but that medical practitioners of all kinds were employed to treat children whenever it was thought appropriate.Footnote 5 However, it still seems to be the case that children as prospective citizens outside the realm of the family receive less attention from historians. The sources that have been most widely used are private ones, such as letters and diaries. This article seeks to underline the importance of sources that could be described as public, aimed in part at public policy towards children. There is of course much excellent work on children inter alia in the context of early modern poor relief, although the impression lingers that it was the eighteenth century when public policy changed for children, on the back of changing attitudes to the child itself. For the decades of the Puritan revolution and their aftermath, which saw so much socio-political upheaval and innovation, we still seem to be dependent in part upon older sources.Footnote 6 With respect to social policy and the child at least, these earlier works have not been entirely displaced by studies of the revolutionary decades which pay considerable attention to proposals for poor relief, many of them arising from members of the Hartlib circle.Footnote 7
2. JOHN GRAUNT, CITIZEN OF LONDON AND PIONEERING STATISTICIAN
Graunt, author of the Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality, first published in 1662 and achieving five editions thereafter, is perhaps most highly valued by historians of demography and statistics.Footnote 8 As a Baconian who addressed himself to the Royal Society he is well known to historians of science. As a pioneering analyst of contemporary reckoning of causes of death, he is prized by historians of both medicine and epidemics.Footnote 9 Graunt's own subjectivity, and his reactions to the turbulent times in which he lived, have been of less interest, and the Observations has rarely attracted more than incidental notice from historians of politics and society. Yet Graunt's groundbreaking work on the life and death of populations was influenced by a number of presumptions and convictions, or pseudodoxia, on the part of his contemporaries that he thought were both wrong, and likely to distort social, economic and political policies alike. These included issues of population, in particular the size of London. He also wanted to calm unnecessary fears, and to offer reassurance, particularly to those in government after the Restoration. In pressing for the usefulness of his tabulations and analyses, he highlighted how they served to dispel, not just contemporary anxieties but also what we may call urban or political ‘myths’ or rumours about the legitimacy of the new order under Charles II, and about phenomena such as plague epidemics, which seemed to burst out at every accession of a Stuart monarch, and which could be – and were – interpreted as meaning that God's providence did not favour Charles II's reinstatement.Footnote 10
In the process Graunt paid careful attention to all parts of the population, women and children as well as men. With respect to women, it has been possible to show how his definitive demonstration that the sex ratio was equal – that the proportions of men and women were evenly balanced – was intended to address a range of nagging anxieties connected with religion, political unrest, prophecy, libertinism, misogyny and the status of women generally. Graunt's finding contradicted, he said, the commonly held view that there were three times as many women as there were men. Graunt's statements about the sex ratio and the pointlessness of polygamy implied a labyrinth of concerns, all of which seemed to be particularly acute for the revolutionary decades and their aftermath under the new regime of the Restoration.Footnote 11 But Graunt did not write only about women: he also wrote about children, as well as counting them in new and different ways. As we will see, in so doing he arrived at striking, and troubling, conclusions about the levels of child mortality in London.
Graunt presented 50 copies of his work, which was in effect his sole publication, to members of the fledgling Royal Society. Many indispensable accounts of Graunt place him in the context of the rise of science under the aegis of the post-Restoration Royal Society, seeing his studiously neutral tone and empirical approach as an early example of the scientific method objectively applied to social and epidemiological questions. However, it is clear that Graunt spent some years collecting and analysing the Bills of Mortality before publication, and the best years of his adult intellectual life (he was born in 1620, and died in 1674) were consequently spent during the revolutionary decades, when many members of the Hartlib circle were also at their most active. Hartlib himself died in his early sixties in 1662, the year in which the Observations was published.
Unfortunately we know next to nothing about Graunt's early convictions, except that he made a difficult journey as a young man from a Puritan upbringing to Socinianism, a radical set of beliefs involving a rejection of the Trinity, to devout Roman Catholicism before his death.Footnote 12 Both Socinianism and Catholicism were of course almost equally unpopular at the time, so this must have been a painful process for Graunt internally as well as in terms of how he was regarded both by his contemporaries and posthumously. One effect was that his findings were approved while he himself increasingly was not, which helps explain why it was convenient to attribute credit for the Observations not to him but to his friend William Petty, who was a close associate of Hartlib but swiftly adjusted to the Restoration regime.Footnote 13
3. DEATHS AMONG LONDON'S CHILDREN – THE EVOLUTION OF AN INFANT MORTALITY RATE
Given how many cultural, political and gendered anxieties can be detected as lurking behind Graunt's supposedly neutral and empirical remarks about women, it seemed at least plausible that some similarly complex background might attach to what he had to say about children. However this case proved to be rather different. Although I think it can be argued that major issues are involved, including gender and politics, Graunt gives no indication at the textual level that there are societal problems to be confronted with respect to child death itself. I would like to suggest that possible reasons for his apparent detachment include connections with gender or at least a gendered division of labour and familial involvement. Ultimately, it emerges as highly relevant that Graunt was male, and that virtually all those among his contemporaries who discussed social policy in respect of children were also male. Although this seems obvious, and indeed should be so, it seems rarely to be taken into account by historians writing about children outside the family or household. In retrospect, historiographically speaking, it appears that the gender factor should have been given more consideration by those historians who argued for early modern indifference towards children, as well as by those who disputed such interpretations, since virtually all the sources and institutions they considered were male-authored or male-dominated.Footnote 14 As I hope will become clear in discussing the Hartlib circle in section 6 below, I am not remotely suggesting that men of the early modern period did not care about children, but rather that they thought about, and consequently wrote about, children in a different way from women.Footnote 15
In spite of the fact that Graunt begins the Observations by likening himself to a silly schoolboy, come to say his lesson to the world – ‘silly’ in the Shakespearean sense of innocent and powerless, often applied to women and children, rather than in the modern sense – those interested in social attitudes towards children may initially be struck more by what Graunt does not write about.Footnote 16 It is worth noting these conspicuous absences, given his apparent interest in the causes of death among children in an urban environment. He shows, for example, no interest in children's hospitals or in parish children, or in the special vulnerabilities of orphans, foundlings or children born out of wedlock. He is not specifically interested in the crime of infanticide, which has attracted significant attention from historians. The list of points that he emphasises as being appropriate for government and magistrates to consider includes nothing related specifically to children, unless we count his recommendation that those in authority should take note of the balance between christenings and burials, and also of the age structure of the population they were responsible for. Graunt also suggests ways of finding out how many women and children ‘do just nothing’ apart from learning to spend what others get – in other words, the extent of idleness and unemployment, even among children.Footnote 17 This was not unusual in the contemporary context: even young children were expected to work. None of the ‘conceits, opinions and conjectures’, his own and other men's, which Graunt is concerned to contradict, relate directly to children, which contrasts with his interest in the balance between the sexes. Obviously, like a good Baconian, Graunt is led by his sources, but at the same time the Bills say nothing either about polygamy, and this did not prevent Graunt from discussing that controversial subject. It would appear then that in discussing children Graunt felt he was part of an untroubled male consensus that did not require correction.
Historians of childhood as well as historical demographers can certainly identify with one issue that Graunt does raise, which is how contemporaries defined a child. This is important given the variability with which terms like ‘child’ and ‘infant’ were used at this time. We should note here that, as far as the women searchers who collected information were concerned, identifying the dead person as an infant, or a chrisom – that is, a child dying within the first month of life or soon after baptism – was sufficient in itself to account for a death.Footnote 18 In his chapter on ‘General Observations on the Casualties’ Graunt writes:
In the matters of Infants I would desire but to know clearly, what the Searchers mean by Infants, as whether Children that cannot speak, as the word Infant seems to signifie, or Children under two or three years old, although I should not be satisfied, whether the Infant died of Wind, or of Teeth, or of the Convulsion, &c. or were choaked with Phlegm, or else of Teeth, Convulsion and Scowring, apart, or together, which, they say, do often cause one another; for, I say, it is somewhat to know how many die usually before they can speak, or how many live past any assigned number of years.Footnote 19
In other words, if he could be sure of the mortality afflicting the younger age categories, it would be of lesser importance if he could not be certain of the exact causes of death. Graunt's main purpose is less to examine child deaths per se, than to arrive at a workable estimate of what proportion of all deaths could be ascribed to different age groups. Nonetheless, we should note that it is the fate of children that Graunt takes as his first ‘observation’. Age at death was not at this time given in the Bills, although some parish clerks might include such detail in the parish registers. It should be understood therefore that Graunt is making deductions, rather than simply counting. In making his workable estimate, Graunt gives us an idea of what contemporaries thought were the most common causes of death in children, revised by his own sense of the balance of probabilities. Thus he takes a total of 229,250 deaths from all causes over periods adding up to 20 years, of which 71,124 died of the thrush, convulsions, rickets, teeth and worms, and as abortives, chrisoms, infants, livergrown and overlaid.Footnote 20 He concludes that this one-third of the whole total of all causes could be supposed to all ‘light upon’ children under four or five years old. Similarly, he estimates that of 12,210 deaths from small pox, swine pox, and measles, and of worms without convulsions, about half might be of children under six years old. He does not concern himself with other diseases, like bladder and kidney stones, or accidents, which affected children as well as adults, albeit in lesser numbers. Taking plague, that ‘extraordinary and grand Casualty’, into account as well, he finds that a total of about 36 per cent of all quick (or live) conceptions died before six years old.Footnote 21 This is very roughly comparable to modern estimates of early modern infant mortality rates, which are usually calculated by historical demographers in terms of a combination of endogenous mortality – up to one month after birth and including congenital conditions and birth trauma – and exogenous mortality, usually from infectious diseases, up to one year or beyond.Footnote 22
It is at this point that the important question arises of whether Graunt's calculation is the earliest attempt at an IMR, an infant mortality rate.Footnote 23 It would seem that it is, which makes it a highly significant achievement on Graunt's part, and one especially noteworthy in the present context. Authorities on Graunt have made surprisingly little of this: it appears in lists of his achievements, usually without further comment, and is given further attention only in the context of Graunt's pioneering attempt to imagine a population structured by age and sex according to survivors to each age. This was to lead ultimately to what demographers now call a life table, though Graunt himself did not calculate life expectancies.Footnote 24 In making little of Graunt's IMR, commentators might, without realising it, have been following the example set by Graunt himself. His figure for infant and child mortality is a shocking one, but he does not say so, or comment in any evaluative way. It could be argued that Graunt expected his numbers to speak for themselves, but this is to overlook the fact, first, that he allowed himself to comment freely on other numbers, notably the sex ratio; and secondly, that he clearly makes a decision to pass over his IMR finding as either any kind of index to London's health, or as an issue for government.
Instead, he moves on to define, by a process of elimination, the proportion of chronic diseases, which he saw as showing the ‘ordinary temper of the place’, so that ‘upon the proportion of Chronical Diseases seems to hang the judgment of the fitness of the Country for long life’. Acute and epidemical diseases, on the other hand, showed the ‘aptness of the Air to sudden and vehement Impressions’. So, for the ‘absolute Standard’ of healthfulness Graunt combines the two, and settles on the proportion of the aged – old age being defined as conforming to King David's figure of three score years and ten. For London, Graunt estimates this proportion to be about 7 per cent. Hence, he concludes, it follows that ‘if in any other Country more than seven of the 100 live beyond 70, such Country is to be esteemed more healthful than this of our City’.Footnote 25 Deaths among infants and children, therefore, however frequent and devastating, were not at this time the principal measure of urban health, which contrasts with much later thinking, especially in the present day.Footnote 26 Graunt's estimate of an infant mortality rate thus appears as a means to an end, not an end in itself. He does note that only seasoned bodies could live long in London, whereas children, like newcomers, were vulnerable to London's quality of air. It was not an entirely negative picture for London as compared with the country, because London's air was already so heavily impregnated that it was less susceptible to new epidemic influences.Footnote 27
Graunt was however concerned about births (measured by christenings) as opposed to deaths, partly because he wanted to contradict those who claimed that the restoration of Charles II had led to less ‘fruitfulness’, seen as another mark of God's alleged dislike of the new regime.Footnote 28 Graunt's other comments about London's birth rate do reflect on the nature of the urban environment: for example, he finds that: (1) few children were born except to permanent inhabitants of London; (2) London apprentices tended to stay on without marrying; (3) metropolitan promiscuity led to fewer births, as did high levels of mental activity or anxiety; (4) there were fewer ‘breeders’ in London because wives were left in the country or not ‘used’ by those who had come to London for medical treatment; and (5) women who constrained their bodies with fashionable dresses gave birth less successfully than women in Ireland or the American colonies. In general, he also inferred, the more sickly the year, the less fruitful of births it was likely to be; and christenings were the best measure of the decrease and increase of people, because the figures were not distorted by births attributable to visitors to London. These ‘natural’ observations were all linked to the political issue, which was whether London was growing too large and if so how and at whose expense.Footnote 29
4. INFERRING CAUSES OF CHILD DEATH – THE ‘NEW’ DISEASE OF RICKETS
Graunt does pass remarks on particular conditions of childhood, usually in relation to accuracy of reporting, or to any apparent challenge to his premise that certain proportions among causes of death did not change over time. For example, when he finds that the total of deaths of chrisoms and from convulsions combined had declined in recent years, he infers that deaths from ‘teeth’ were being included in earlier years under the title of chrisoms and infants, because the totals of those dying from worms and teeth in the earlier period were lower by about the same proportion. In arguing in favour of the reliability of the Bills, he affirms that many casualties were a matter of sense (that is, sense perception), for example being able to tell whether a man died of old age, or if a child was abortive or stillborn.Footnote 30 He asserts more than once that few died of starvation, not more than 51 out of the 229,250 – a conclusion he presents to reassure, or exonerate, those in authority. As with any good demographer today, single instances, or by extension small numbers, had limited significance in the context of Graunt's analysis. However he does cite ‘helpless Infants at Nurse’ as the exception to the minimal numbers of the starving. The combined category of ‘overlaid and starved’ listed in his table of ‘notorious diseases’ amounted to 529 of the 229,250 deaths, or 0.2 per cent. Nonetheless he continues to convey a reassuring message by adding that such deaths, being ‘caused rather by carelessness, ignorance and infirmity of the Milch-women, [are] not properly an effect or sign of want of food in the Country, or of means to get it’.Footnote 31
The one disease specifically attributed to children on which Graunt does offer some brief commentary is rickets, even though the numbers involved were small. What were his reasons for this? He might have thought it politic, or necessary, because the physician and natural philosopher Francis Glisson, who had established himself as the authority on rickets following his monograph on it published in 1650, was a luminary and founding fellow of the Royal Society, the body to which Graunt dedicated his work.Footnote 32 There was also for Graunt the somewhat inconvenient fact that rickets suddenly appeared in the Bills as a cause of death in 1634, when the tiny total of 14 deaths was attributed to it.Footnote 33 Given Graunt's mode of argument, new diseases were potentially a source of difficulty, at least if they caused significant numbers of deaths.Footnote 34 Hence Graunt pithily observes, ‘the Question is, Whether that Disease did first appear about that time; or whether a Disease, which had been long before, did then first receive its Name’ – the sort of question which medical historians have been arguing about ever since. Graunt is circumspect, declaring that his only intention was to ‘clear this Difficulty out of the Bills (for I dare venture on no deeper Arguments)’. He did however go so far as to make enquiries as to what other casualty before 1634 was most like the rickets, and found – as he characteristically puts it – ‘not only by Pretenders to know it, but also from other Bills’, that livergrown was the nearest. He then looked ‘forwards and backwards’ in the Bills at the variation in totals for rickets and livergrown, and found that while it seemed clear that rickets and livergrown were confounded, as he put it, in the judgement of the children's nurses, the total for rickets did increase, reaching 521 in 1660, whereas livergrown had only exceeded 100 deaths once, in 1630.Footnote 35
Graunt concluded, with some caution, that rickets was in fact a new disease, that it had never been so common as it was when he was writing, and that it was still increasing. He also found that rickets, stopping of the stomach, and rising of the lights, had all increased together, and in some kind of correspondent proportions, and even hazards the explanation that rickets could cause the other conditions by ‘squeezing and crowding’ upon other organs in the body. Hence rickets in childhood could lead to these other conditions affecting stomach and lungs in later life. Graunt then bows out of the issue, by handing it over to the ‘Learned Physicians’ to consider, ‘as I presume they have’.Footnote 36 The latter phrase implies, to the modern reader at least, that Graunt knew little about medical writing on the subject. As we shall see, this seems highly unlikely, if not impossible, so that we may detect here a note of irony.
Rickets is relevant in this context not simply because of Graunt's methodological problem with new diseases, but because of its connections with contemporary rivalries and political upheavals. Francis Glisson's much-praised Latin monograph was preceded by Daniel Whistler's MD dissertation submitted at Leiden five years before, in 1645, and Glisson and his colleagues in the College of Physicians did not start work on rickets until this date. There is, I would suggest, a Whistler/Glisson story not wholly unlike the Graunt/Petty story: both reflect what could happen to those who lose out under a new regime. The lives of Whistler and Graunt show many common features. Whistler was an active Parliamentarian who performed diplomatic, naval and administrative services for the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Graunt was bred a Puritan and became a major in the London militias or trained bands – in the first edition of the Observations he described himself as Captain John Graunt. Both rose to hold responsible positions in their respective occupational organisations, Graunt in the Drapers’ Company and Whistler in the College of Physicians. Both prospered in London but became casualties in later life. Whistler made money as a physician and also married money, but fell into poverty and ended his life under a cloud, being accused of confusing College of Physicians’ funds with his own. He died in 1684, and, as his reputation declined, so Glisson's rose, as both a natural philosopher and as the author of the first learned monograph on a new disease. Whistler's priority was increasingly dismissed and his character disparaged, especially by medical practitioners writing the history of their own profession and its part in the seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’.
The parallel between Glisson and Petty on the other hand is hardly exact, as few could have been more active in the cause of revolutionary reconstruction than Petty, but Graunt, like Whistler, fell into poverty after the Restoration, was accused of malfeasance, and discredited by those who preferred to give the credit for the Observations to Petty, who adjusted to the Restoration regime and went on to found a dynasty which ultimately joined the English aristocracy.Footnote 37 An actual link between Graunt and Whistler is implied by the fact that it was Whistler who presented the copies of the Observations to the Royal Society on Graunt's behalf. Whistler was also a member of the committee appointed by the Society to evaluate the book.Footnote 38
The subject of rickets also raises the essential issue of the extent of knowledge of medical matters, and in particular those relating to children, which we can attribute to laymen and women or those who were not regular medical practitioners. This was vital for Graunt as the basis on which all his calculations depended, and it is in relation to rickets that he most clearly makes his case. I would argue that Graunt had a down-to-earth respect for lay knowledge and observation, including by women, which was in part Baconian and in part characteristic of the circle of Puritan reformers around Samuel Hartlib, who were also influenced by Bacon.Footnote 39 Some later writers have argued for Petty's role in the Observations on the grounds of its medical content, which Petty as a physician had privileged access to and, as they see it, Graunt did not. This I would suggest is anachronistic; in this period lay and medical knowledge overlapped. Similarly, the rickets story has in a sense been hijacked by those who wish to see it as one of the achievements of medical progress, elite learning, and post-Restoration natural philosophy, all of them personified by Glisson. However, rickets only appeared in the London Bills in the 1630s because the term began to be used either by the searchers, those ancient and supposedly ignorant matrons sworn to their office, or by the nurses and parents from whom the searchers gained their information. Whistler reported that ‘it is said’ the disease had first been noticed about 26 years before he wrote about it in 1645, that is, around 1620.Footnote 40 Audrey Eccles and Valerie Fildes have both noted the diffusion of references to rickets in family records, and more recently, Layinka Swinburne has drawn attention to numerous references to rickets in recipe books of the Fairfax family compiled between 1626 and 1635. Certain recipes for rickets in these collections can definitely be dated to 1632, before any mention appears in the Bills of Mortality. Swinburne also notes the radical physician Nicholas Culpeper's reference in 1653 to ‘the disease in children which women call the Ricketts’.Footnote 41
Moreover, one explanation for the rather obscure etymology of the popular term ‘rickets’, following a suggestion made by Whistler, attributes it to a part of the south-west, namely Somerset and Dorset. Dorset was also the county where Glisson's family was located during his childhood. Perhaps significantly, Glisson gave currency, and indeed priority, to the Greco-Latin term ‘rachitis’, and suggested that ‘rickets’ was merely a corruption of the Greek.Footnote 42 In other words, rickets had to be the property of the learned tradition. Characteristically, Culpeper, the ‘enlarger and corrector’ of the translation of Glisson into the vernacular, poured scorn on the College of Physicians’ adoption of the Latin term. Another explanation for the source of the popular name, again according to Whistler, was that the condition was named after a practitioner who was particularly successful in treating it.Footnote 43 John Aubrey, in his natural history of Wiltshire, went one better and named the practitioner in question as ‘one Ricketts … a Practitioner in Physick’, relocating him to Newbury and to ‘about 1620’. He clearly thought little of appropriations such as Glisson's, adding that ‘now ’tis good sport to see how they vex their Lexicons, and fetch it from the Greek’.Footnote 44 The attribution to ‘one Ricketts’ may seem too folksy to be true, but some explanation has to be found for why the term ‘rickets’ suddenly emerged and gained popular currency. Some solid evidence for enterprise in this area exists: an irregular practitioner specialising in rickets named William Trigge was prosecuted by the London College of Physicians as early as 1631.Footnote 45 The main point here is that this children's disease emerged by popular definition, that women were essential to this definition, and that as such this ‘new’ disease of children was taken seriously by Graunt in his analysis of the Bills of Mortality, and given particular attention.
Graunt himself, as we have seen, apparently felt obliged to genuflect to superior knowledge. However, he specifically includes rickets among those conditions which ‘the generality of the World are able pretty well to distinguish’, and in a somewhat oblique but nonetheless telling comment at the end of his observations on this disease he seems to indicate where his true sympathies lay:
I had not medled thus far, but that I have heard, the first hints of the circulation of the Blood were taken from a common Person's wondering what became of all the blood which issued out of the heart, since the heart beats above three thousand times an hour, although but one drop should be pump'd out of it at every stroke.Footnote 46
William Harvey's account of the circulation of the blood was of course, then as now, regarded as one of the greatest achievements of what came to be called the Scientific Revolution, and Francis Glisson's name was, and is, frequently coupled with Harvey's as demonstrating England's pre-eminence in natural philosophy and the learned tradition. But Graunt, apparently well aware of this, is prepared to allow a role for a ‘common’ person's intelligence in physiology as well as in the observation of children's diseases. In the former instance, the person concerned was probably male; the observers of childhood illnesses and deaths were primarily female.
There may be a yet further reason why Graunt chose to single out rickets for attention: in this case the reason is political. In 1661, a year before the publication of the Observations, John Bird, an arts graduate of Merton College, Oxford, published Ostenta Carolina, a tract in support of restored monarchy which coupled together rickets and the king's evil, or scrofula, as diseases subject to the power of a thaumaturgic king. Bird's subtitle claimed his work ‘also … proved I. That the Rekets after a while shall seize on no more Children, but quite vanish through the Mercy of God, and by Means of K. Charles II … [and] That K. Charles II is the Last of Kings that shall so Heal the Kings-Evil’.Footnote 47 In a further, albeit dubious, illustration of the perceived importance of terminology, Bird derived ‘rekets’ from ‘regentes’, a reference to the false rulers who deposed the Stuarts. Similarly he gave somewhat contrived reasons why, according to God's plan, rickets was a disease of children alone, female as well as male, which could be healed only by Charles's advent. He also derived from the signs and symptoms of rickets, and the three ‘vulgar remedies’ used against it, an elaborate set of metaphors or ‘mysteries’ signifying the political events of the revolutionary decades.Footnote 48 In spite of also contradicting beliefs critical of monarchy, Graunt by contrast avoided such contrived explanations, and might have wished to displace them, especially as Bird cited the Bills of Mortality. As we have seen, Graunt's conclusion was that rickets was not healed but ‘still increasing’, and that ‘back-startings seem to be universal in all things’.Footnote 49
5. A REVOLUTION IN CHILDBIRTH AND CHILD SURVIVAL?
One more of Graunt's observations on child deaths should be noted here. We have already noted his interest in London's birth rate and the circumstances affecting it. He also calculates that abortives and stillborns amounted to about a twentieth of the total of those who lived to be christened, and that the number of those aborted or born dead had not increased proportionately to population over the last thirty years as he expected it should. He suggests that this may be due to poor recording of abortives in recent years, or to the burial of them without notice or outside churchyards, two factors of which modern historical demographers would also take note. Graunt goes on to argue that there were further reasons to conclude that there had been neglect in the recording of christenings during the recent upheavals and religious divisions, which was as we have already seen an important matter for his basic calculations.Footnote 50 At no point does he actually suggest that the management of pregnancy and childbirth might have improved in recent years – that is, during the revolutionary decades – and thus caused a reduction in abortives and stillborns. It would in fact hardly have been tactful for him to be explicit on this point, given his concern to be reassuring about the ‘fruitfulness’ of the new regime. However, it is possible that others were prepared to draw this inference from his analysis. There is a tantalising link with what was written over twenty years later, in 1688, by Elizabeth Cellier, the Catholic midwife married to a Frenchman, who was tried for treason and libel and pilloried for involvement in various alleged Popish plots.Footnote 51 Like Graunt, Cellier was a convert to Catholicism after the civil wars of the 1640s. Cellier claimed that the yearly Bills of Mortality from 1642 to 1662 showed that ‘there did not then happen the eight[h] part of the Casualties, either to Women or Children, as do now’. Cellier attributed this reduction in mortality to the Cromwellian regime's dismantling of the ecclesiastical system of licensing midwives, and its replacement with examination and licensing by midwives and surgeons expert in midwifery at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. This system, she states, continued until ecclesiastical licensing was reinstated by the Act of Uniformity in 1662.Footnote 52 It is tempting to think that Cellier was picking up on Graunt's observation about a fall in the incidence of failed pregnancies and corresponding increase in live births, but there is, unfortunately, no evidence so far found by Doreen Evenden or anyone else, that a new system of qualifying midwives was introduced during the revolutionary decades.Footnote 53
Elizabeth Cellier was proposing not only a midwives’ corporation but also a college for infants, designed to rescue the abandoned and destitute.Footnote 54 Her proposal appears to have postdated the ‘Infantory or Colledg of Infants at Clerkenwell’, c. 1685–c. 1691, which in any case, in spite of its name, seems to have catered for children of an age to be educated.Footnote 55 Looming behind Cellier's schemes was the influence of the Hartlib circle in general but probably also one or more of the Chamberlen family, including Dr Peter Chamberlen, who died in his early 80s in 1683.Footnote 56 Dr Chamberlen, whose career spanned the revolutionary decades, was perhaps the most colourful and versatile of the medical and obstetrical dynasty of Chamberlens founded by William, a Huguenot refugee who settled in England in the 1560s.Footnote 57 The Chamberlens had been pushing for a corporation of midwives in London, preferably instructed and licensed by themselves, from the 1610s. But Dr Peter – it is customary to call him this to distinguish him from his father and his uncle, both called Peter and both barber-surgeons – resembled William Petty in producing a flow of different schemes of reform as well as projects and religious debate, particularly about infant baptism.Footnote 58 He had become a Seventh-Day Baptist by 1659. One of Dr Peter's religious tracts was responded to in 1652 by a John Graunt – disappointingly, this proves to be the minor religious writer John Graunt of Bucklersbury in Cheap ward, dwelling at the sign of the Half Moon.Footnote 59 John Graunt, or Grant, was a frustratingly common name at that time.
Dr Peter Chamberlen, like Graunt himself, was one of those on the periphery of the Hartlib circle. For example, ‘Dr Chamberlain the man-midwife’ made a visit to Hartlib in 1659 and confided to him a cure for kidney stones.Footnote 60 Hartlib recorded his reactions to hearing Petty discuss Chamberlen's poor relief schemes.Footnote 61 There are hints of a certain competitiveness between Petty and Chamberlen over their ideas on such matters as tax reform.Footnote 62 For the remainder of this article I will look briefly at the Hartlib Papers, by way of providing a context for the apparent deficiencies, or reticences, in Graunt's approach to child health. Hartlib's correspondence and his ‘Ephemerides’, his daily diary or notebook, record contacts with Graunt, partly as an effect of Graunt's close personal and business ties with Petty, and particularly when Petty was in Ireland in the early 1650s.Footnote 63 Petty of course made fairly frequent references to Graunt's Observations in his own writings. In Hartlib's papers, again, Graunt has to be distinguished from Dr Thomas Grent or Grant (d. 1649), an inventive Fellow of the College of Physicians who, among other things, proposed ‘rare devices for bathing and filling roomes with odoriferous aires’.Footnote 64
6. HARTLIBIAN REFORMERS AND CHILDREN – MIND, BODY AND SOUL
The overriding issue relating to children in the concerns of the Hartlib circle was that of education, a concept comprehending mind, body and soul. The group around Hartlib produced at least 50 educational works between 1640 and 1660, and Hartlib himself worked as a teacher of children. Although the Hartlibian proposals were practical, and designed to appeal, as Graunt did, to the anxieties of magistrates, the imperative behind them was ultimately religious.Footnote 65 The second most salient concern, a related one, was the relief, or rather the rescue, of poor children. Virtually all of the outpouring of pamphlets aimed at inducing parliament and public opinion to revive schemes for poor relief, especially in London, were written by authors with some connection to the Hartlib circle. Most made some reference to children.Footnote 66 Paul Slack notes a sensitivity to the sufferings of poor children, which is difficult to find earlier, and suggests that the London Corporation of the Poor should be seen as the ‘pinnacle of the Hartlib group's practical achievements’.Footnote 67 One of these pamphleteers, Rice Bush, whom Slack has done much to bring to our attention, and who was also one of the principal movers in setting up and running the Corporation of the Poor, refers to the Bills of Mortality and shows himself well aware of the schemes for the education, training, and medical treatment of poor children developed by Norwich, Ipswich and Dorchester half a century before. Like Graunt, Bush was a freeman of the Drapers’ Company and probably also a captain in the London trained bands.Footnote 68
Overall, although there were anxieties expressed about children breaking the Sabbath, or learning to swear even before they knew enough to bless, the positive attitude to children current in the Hartlib circle could be summed up in a story recorded more than once by Hartlib and which probably circulated widely. A man living in adultery, otherwise a good man, was walking with a friend in Cheapside and spotted a very pretty little child of an age to talk, sitting at a window. The man went to speak to the pretty child, a boy, whereupon it instantly said to him, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ The man was much struck, turned deathly pale and subsequently repented of his way of life. In what could be called a typically Protestant footnote, Hartlib added that the child's apparent insight was due to the fact that its parents, just before, had been teaching the child the Ten Commandments.Footnote 69 Although Hartlib seemingly approved of this story, and hence of the precocity of the child, he and his associates also show considerable concern for the problem of when best to teach a child religion, and by what means.Footnote 70 Too early, and the child could not be expected to understand; too late, and the child might have already learned bad ways by imitation. Perhaps most characteristically among all the Hartlibian references to childhood and childishness, man was portrayed as the child of God: to quote one sermon copied into the Hartlib papers, ‘there is no Creature so poore, so childish, so impotent in respect of man as the best of men is in Respect of God’.Footnote 71 Thus a truly religious man, who thought rightly, would know what it was to be childlike – but only in relation to God.
The regular discourse of the Hartlib circle as represented in the Hartlib Papers exhibits many common constructions that reflected on childhood and children's nature. These included proverbs, as in the burnt child fears the fire; comparing having an idea with being large with child, a characteristically male construction I would suggest; comparing one form of fruitfulness and nurture with another; and, in terms of the accessibility and viability of ideas or projects, many references to what a child could be expected to understand. Typically of most personal correspondence of the period, including that by men, the Hartlib Papers also contain many reports of the health of the writer's or a friend's children, exchanges of recipes for prominent complaints of children such as worms, the king's evil, and scald head, and accounts of the effects on a woman of the death of her child. Perhaps less typically, Hartlib transmits a letter from the clergyman and agricultural reformer John Beale in which Beale tells of examining under a microscope worms taken from the swollen body of a four-year-old child.Footnote 72 He had, wrote Beale, never seen the like before, and linked this phenomenon both to a local plague of horses, in which the horses’ mouths were found to be full of worms, and to a report that the sick child's worms had come from a dead rat found on its bedcovers. Beale might have tried to adopt the objective Baconian approach, but he was clearly greatly disturbed by this plague of worms and also by the condition of his three daughters, ‘sick of a strange disease that reigns here very much’ which included spots like measles, a vehement cough and also worms. He ended his letter, ‘the Lord shew mercy on us’.Footnote 73
Graunt's analysis does of course lack this kind of individual detail, but there are ways in which the Hartlib material resembles Graunt's Observations. First, in the health-related areas, almost more concern is shown about childbirth, than about actual children. Secondly, there is concern specifically about rickets. Hartlib's references to rickets are mostly undated notes of different recipes and cures, two of which mention Dr Arnold Boate or De Boot, a Dutch physician, biblical scholar and close associate of Robert Boyle and Hartlib, who has some claim to be seen as an early authority on rickets.Footnote 74 In one of these Boate is noted as disapproving of the recipe of a Mrs Selby.Footnote 75 Hartlib also mentions in 1648, three years after Whistler's thesis and two years before Glisson's monograph, that one Garanzier was writing ‘another pretty Treatise of the Rickets’.Footnote 76 ‘Garanzier’ can be identified as Theophilus Garencières, an immigrant Parisian, MD of Caen, who renounced Catholicism in favour of Protestantism and became a fellow of the London College of Physicians. However, Garencières’ book, in Latin, was about consumption, not rickets, the mistake apparently having arisen because Garencières identified consumption as an English disease.Footnote 77 The two diseases were often associated as forms of wasting, and rickets was in any case readily conflated with both consumption and infantile scurvy. To problems of diagnosis were added the difficulties of examining and treating infants who were already in pain.Footnote 78
Thirdly, although there are references to very young children, and anxiety about their physical and spiritual well-being, the Hartlibian thinking and plans for the child, including education, work and religious instruction, are primarily organised around children of about seven years of age – that is, the traditional age of reason, or rather the age at which it was supposed a child could be reasoned with.Footnote 79 I would like to suggest that both Graunt and the male members of the Hartlib circle shared remnants of the equally traditional view that the welfare of infants and very young children under the age of about seven was, like the birth chamber itself, not the business of men. In the elaborated notion of the ‘seven ages of man’ dominant in the Renaissance, children under seven were seen as though they were in a vegetative state, requiring help to feed and grow.Footnote 80 The years from seven were those during which the child could be educated or trained.Footnote 81 Consequently the years of highest risk of mortality, up to around the age of seven, were seen as the responsibility of women, and what we perceive in the early modern male is a form of standing alongside, or, at most, action at a distance. This would help to explain what some earlier historians of childhood, using sources produced by men, have taken to be either indifference or a lack of recognition of childhood as a special state, and it brings us back to the issue of gender politics in respect of the Observations raised at the beginning of this article. As highlighted previously, this is not to suggest that children were never tended by male relatives, or treated by male practitioners, but rather that the latter were rarely the first port of call in the case of childhood illness, and also that their care tended to be mediated by women.Footnote 82 This is even more the probability with respect to babies and infants. Effectively, as already suggested, this can be seen as the basis upon which Graunt relied for the validity of his calculations: this was information provided and collected by women, not men. ‘Action at a distance’ on the part of men, on the other hand, is embodied not only by Graunt's Observations but also by such examples as the book on childhood diseases of 1664 by S. J. (physician of Oundle), which was dedicated to Robert Boyle for his generosity, humanity and learning in natural philosophy. One of Boyle's first writings (1647) was on the duty of mothers to nurse their children.Footnote 83 S. J.’s book is devoted to children but its description of practice makes constant reference to the mediating figure of the child patient's nurse. That this set of attitudes changed or at least moderated seems clear, but the reasons are less so. Andrea Rusnock traces the transition to a (male) concern about infant mortality, but her argument for the seventeenth century depends on the ‘fatalism’ attributed to Philippe Ariès.Footnote 84
Finally, that both Graunt and the Hartlibians showed so much interest in childbirth, rather than childhood, could be interpreted as showing either that the mid-seventeenth century was an age of transition, heralding the age of the man-midwife of which the Chamberlens were such prominent and early examples; or, more plausibly, that men's exclusion from the birth chamber itself could easily be combined by them with a concern for their wives, for their posterity, and even for the populousness of the realm.
7. CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, it seems to be important, in respect to the nature of his coverage of the health of children, that Graunt was a male author. This may explain part of his lack of protest at the levels of child mortality he revealed. Graunt undoubtedly helped to define the urban penalty, that is, the excess burden of mortality suffered by towns and by London in particular, but he did not define it in terms of child deaths.Footnote 85 However, there are other aspects to this. Graunt's basic premise about constant proportions among the different causes of death created a resistance in his thinking to the idea of excess, preventable disease in respect of what were seen as the normal diseases and casualties of infancy and childhood.Footnote 86 By their very construction, the Bills of Mortality, being built up of the observations of what common women searchers expected to see or were told by other common people, had a tendency towards normalisation, even though we need always to allow also for the vagaries of rumour, fashion, deep-seated and irrational fears and the appeal of novelty. Most aberrations in the toll of deaths were ironed out by Graunt's process of aggregation, except for rare cases like rickets, or where he wished to rectify his contemporaries’ distorted sense of risk.
Lastly, whether one sees Graunt as a pioneer of scientific objectivity, or as a man under stress wishing to appear to steady the ship of state rather than rocking it, or as a naturally modest man aware that he was addressing his social superiors, or all three, there is no doubt that his published writing lacks the passion and protest to be found in different ways in the Hartlib Papers and Hartlibian publications, even though there was a shared Baconian respect for facts. We can detect however a common distancing from the welfare of infants and very young children: even passionate reformers had areas of inhibition in this context. At the same time, politics is critical: the Hartlibians were publishing mainly during the revolutionary decades, while Graunt was trying to accommodate to the very different environment after 1660. As already indicated, Graunt did not manage to preserve his personal and posthumous reputation. The satirist and cleric Jonathan Swift is known to have been familiar with the writings of both Graunt and Petty. Graunt's dispassionate approach might have inspired some part of the sense of outrage conveyed so effectively in Swift's ‘modest proposal’ for the killing and eating of Irish babies.Footnote 87
Nonetheless, Graunt was apparently the first to arrive at a version of what we now call the infant mortality rate. In so doing, he universalised for his contemporaries their often heart-breaking individual experience of infant and child death. He also identified, with a new kind of accuracy, the conditions from which they were most likely to die. Further research may suggest what effect these revelations might have had. Did it engender fatalism, greater anxiety or an increased tendency to keep young families in the country? Among some groups at least, did it sharpen concern for the infant's soul, and add urgency to the attempt to claim the child's soul for God? Literature directly addressing the child, and making assumptions about the imminence of death, seems to be a feature of the post-Restoration period.Footnote 88 While this may primarily be due to changes within nonconformity, the influence of Graunt's findings in such contexts should not be ignored.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Versions of this article were given to the Pre-Modern Towns conference on ‘The Child in the Pre-Modern Town’, London, January 2014, and to the HPS Department, Cambridge, in October 2014. I am grateful to both audiences for their comments, as well as to three anonymous referees for this journal. I owe thanks also to Jeremy Boulton, Terence Doyle, Peter Elmer, Vanessa Harding and Charles Webster, and especially to Philip Kreager and John Stewart for their very helpful readings of later drafts.
