17th-century London Death Roulette

If you lived in London in 1665, your chances of dying were fairly high. Communicable diseases were rampant, sanitation was hit-and-miss, and health care providers didn't have a lot to offer. What you died from could be pretty much anything, since the science of diagnosis was often a matter of guessing. London employed searchers of the dead to determine a person's cause of death, which was important in tracking victims of the plague. These searchers were mostly older, uneducated women who had no better opportunities, and they were subject to pressure and bribery. Therefore, London records show causes of death as simple as old age, falls, and childbirth, and as inexplicable as surfeit, grief, and rising of the lights. While the deceased might have been embarrassed to die of "winde," the survivors would be okay with anything that didn't lead to a quarantine of the remaining family.



Matt Round created the game Death Roulette, in which you spin the wheel (figuratively) to be assigned a random death date and cause based on the actual records from that week in London. As you see, I died of winde, which is "paroxysms of severe gastrointestinal pain," or just what you thought anyway, farts. If the odds were also based on the records, most of us would die from the plague. -via Boing Boing


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The youngest Londoners died so often that their deaths were categorized according to their ages, “Chrisomes” were infants younger than a month old; “teeth” were babies not yet through with teething.
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Kingsevil (scrofula). Had to look that up, which was a bad thing to do during lunch. We'll just call it swelling of the lymph nodes and leave it at that.
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