Following 1636’s outbreak, the plague cast a shadow over London’s life for almost ten years. Data collected from the Bills of Mortality by the Death By Numbers Project suggests that most summers witnessed a plague flare-up between 1638 and 1647. Though in the late 1630s these summer spikes were mild, the occurrence of the plague increased in intensity in the early 1640s up to 1647.1 Indeed, each summer during the 1640s, weekly deaths in London consistently reached into the hundreds, peaking at 250 in the years 1646 and 1647.

Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis. During the seventeenth century, England experienced multiple plague outbreaks. Although milder than the 1603 and 1624 plague crisis, London’s outbreak of 1636 claimed the lives of roughly 10,400 individuals, approximately 7.5% of the population in London and its liberties.1 In this blog post, I delve into the first stages of the 1636 outbreak, by scrutinizing the propagation of the plague through London’s city subdivisions, with the aid of time-to-event analysis.

Figure 1. A photograph of the bill of mortality for the week of November 14-21, 1665. On the Bill of Mortality for the week of November 14-21st, 1665, plague deaths were finally decreasing from a horrific summer. The total number of plague deaths was still a staggering six hundred and fifty-two, but that did not stop parish officials from recording all the other ways that Londoners were dying. One death stood out as an intriguing mystery: starved in White Lyon prison at St George in Southwark.