BILLS OF MORTALITY.

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London's Dreadful Visitation: First edition of this complete annual sequence of the London bills of mortality for 20 December 1664 to 19 December 1665, issued at the height of the Great Plague. First instituted in 1592 and placed under the control of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks in 1611, the bills formed the essential statistical substrate for John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations … Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), the foundational work of modern medical statistics.Graunt (1629-1674), a member of the Common Council of London, had analysed mortality data for several years before publishing his seminal study, which had already reached its second edition (with a third in press) by 1665. Wing attributes London's Dreadful Visitation to "John Graunt of Bucklersbury", an author of religious tracts but not of statistical works; this is almost certainly a misattribution for the celebrated statistician. Most bibliographies cite the work anonymously.The work was printed for the Parish Clerks' Company by Ellen (Eleanor) Cotes (active 1652-70), widow and executor of Richard Cotes, the City of London's official printer. Surveyed in 1668, she was operating three presses with two apprentices and nine pressmen at the Barbican. Both she and her husband produced notable medical books illustrated with large anatomical plates, including translations of works by Ambroise Paré and Adriaan van de Spiegel. Cotes contributed the prefatory note, "The Printer to the Reader"

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