Every News Outlet,

whether it is newspapers, television, or the Internet,

 bring us daily tolls of the infections and deaths of so many, but before these media laden times how was this news communicated? well you bought a copy of “bills of mortality” this one printed in London during the Great Plague of 1665, it was a need for historical perspective that pushed Ellen Cotes to publish London's Dreadful Visitation, Cotes “resolved to communicate unto the Nation, these subsequent leaves” so that “Posterity may not any more be at such a loss”, the causes of death reported by searchers were recorded by sextons and clerks on weekly bills of mortality — sheets sold like broadsides for a penny, meant to let citizens know where the disease had spread,  

above the bill of mortality for the week of 19th–26th September 1665, and remember this was just one week in London, not all of England! a total of 7,165 people in 126 parishes were proclaimed to have died of “Plague” yes over one thousand a day, a number most historians believe to be low, considering how many people (Quakers, Anabaptists, Jews, and the very poor, among others), were not taken into account by the recording Anglicans, in addition to the alarming number of plague deaths, Londoners, of course, continued to die by other means, both familiar and strange, many familiar maladies hide behind the enigmatic naming, “Rising of the Lights”, dreamy though it sounds, was a seventeenth-century term for any death associated with respiratory trouble (“lights” being a word for lungs), “Griping in the guts” and “Stopping of the stomach” were similarly used for deaths accompanied by gastrointestinal complaints, "Spotted feaver" was most likely typhus or meningitis,many labels — such as "suddenly", "frighted", and "grief" — speak of the often approximate nature of assigning a cause (not carried out by medical professionals but rather the "searchers"), "Planet" referred to any illness thought to have been caused by the negative influence/position of one of the planets at the time (a similar astrological source lies behind the name Influenza, literally influence), other causes of death endemic to seventeenth-century England practically litter the bills, Tuberculosis, both in the form of “Consumption” and of “Kingsevil” (a tubercular swelling of the lymph glands which was thought to be curable by the touch of royalty), killed hundreds of people every month, “Surfeit”, meaning overindulgence in food or drink, could sometimes be interchangeable with “Gowt” (gout) or “Dropsie” (edema), and the toll childbearing took on both mother and infant is also painfully evident on the bill, with its entries for “Childbed”, “Infants”, “Stillborn”, “Abortive”, "Teeth" (babies who died while teething), and “Chrisomes” (a catch-all for children who died before they could talk), hopefully this modern plague that we are now experiencing will have nothing like this number of fatalities for Londoners.