Four hundred years ago, the city of London began collecting what it called “Bills of Mortality”: a weekly compilation of births and deaths, which became the first serious attempt at statistical sampling, and the subject of the first significant work of statistics, John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality. This is a tabulation of the causes of death in London during a week at the height of the Black Plague:
| Abortive | 1 |
| Aged | 43 |
| Ague | 2 |
| Apoplexie | 1 |
| Bleeding | 2 |
| Burnt in His Bed by a Candle at St. Giles Cripplegate | 1 |
| Canker | 2 |
| Childbed | 42 |
| Chrisomes | 18 |
| Consumption | 134 |
| Convulsion | 64 |
| Cough | 2 |
| Dropsie | 33 |
| Feaver | 309 |
| Flox and Small-pox | 5 |
| Frighted | 3 |
| Gowt | 1 |
| Grief | 3 |
| Griping in the Guts | 51 |
| Iaundies | 5 |
| Imposthume | 11 |
| Infants | 16 |
| Killed by Fall from Bellfry at Allhallowes the Great | 1 |
| Kingsevil | 2 |
| Lethargy | 1 |
| Palsie | 1 |
| Plague | 716 |
| Rickets | 17 |
| Rising of the Lights | 11 |
| Scowring | 5 |
| Scurvy | 2 |
| Spleen | 1 |
| Spotted Feaver | 101 |
| Stilborn | 17 |
| Stone | 2 |
| Stopping of the Stomach | 9 |
| Strangury | 1 |
| Suddenly | 1 |
| Surfeit | 49 |
| Teeth | 121 |
| Thresh | 5 |
| Tiffick | 12 |
| Timpany | 2 |
| Vomiting | 3 |
| Winde | 3 |
| Wormes | 15 |