20 Facts About John Graunt

1.

John Graunt has been regarded as the founder of demography.

2.

John Graunt was bankrupted later in life by losses suffered during Great Fire of London and the discrimination he faced following his conversion to Catholicism.

3.

John Graunt worked in his father's shop until his father died in 1662, and John Graunt became influential in the City.

4.

John Graunt was able to secure the post of professor of music for his friend William Petty in 1650.

5.

John Graunt is credited with producing and widely distributing the first life table, giving probabilities of survival to each age.

6.

John Graunt is considered as one of the first experts in epidemiology, since his famous book was concerned mostly with public health statistics.

7.

John Graunt's house was destroyed in the Great Fire of London at which point he was a shareholder in the New River Company.

8.

One of his daughters became a nun in a Belgian convent and John Graunt decided to convert to Catholicism at a time when Catholics and Protestants were struggling for control of England and Europe, leading to prosecutions for recusancy.

9.

John Graunt died of jaundice and liver disease at the age of 53.

10.

Sir Liam Donaldson paid tribute to John Graunt's pioneering work in 2012 on the tenth anniversary of the Public Health Observatories.

11.

John Graunt, calculating with the Rule of Three and using ratios obtained by comparing years in the Bills of Mortality, was able to make estimates about the size of the population of London and England, birth rates and mortality rates of males and females, and the rise and spread of certain diseases.

12.

The Bills of Mortality were said by John Graunt to begin in 1592, and consistently released starting in 1603.

13.

John Graunt describes how the data was collected for these Bills in his Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Mortality of Man:.

14.

John Graunt's work reached rudimentary conclusions about the mortality and morbidity of certain diseases.

15.

John Graunt was highly skeptical of the number of deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality as due to the plague.

16.

John Graunt speculated about the reasons for these misclassifications, one of which includes the reliability of those reporting causes of death in the Bills of Mortality.

17.

Some of John Graunt's tables are the only resource for population data for certain periods of time, due to lost records in the Great Fire of London.

18.

John Graunt's work is still used today to study population trends and mortality, for example, studies on suicide.

19.

Tribute to John Graunt's pioneering work was paid by Sir Liam Donaldson in 2012 on the tenth anniversary of the Public Health Observatories.

20.

John Graunt is the narrator of Anthony Clarvoe's 1993 play The Living, which portrays the bubonic plague in London.