The "Dreadful Visitation": public health and public awareness in seventeenth-century London.

Abstract

The decision was made in Britain three centuries ago that an educated populace was best able to deal with a public health crisis of staggering proportions--outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague. As early as 1603, the printing press was enlisted to educate the public about urgent health issues. This education took several forms. The City of London, with the tacit permission of the Crown, printed bills of mortality that reported who was dying of what in London, detailed by parish, for the years in the seventeenth century when plague deaths were reported. New books about plague prevention and cures were published; older works were reprinted. The resulting wealth of data gave impetus to the evolution of the new field of epidemiological demographics, founded by John Graunt and Sir William Petty. Publishing in the plague years also established a model for informing the general populace that is not without parallel in today's "information society."

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