Chronicle from Aldgate

A few minor flaws in the book, such as improper uise of some terms and lack of explanatory footnotes in one or two important tables, could lhave been eliminated by stricter editing; these are, however, inconsequtential defects. The volume is a valuable, useful and on the wlhole readable account of the investigations between 1967 an(d 1969 into the Marburg virus disease. This work is concernied with a series of vital recordls kept between 1558 and 1625 in the London parish of St. Botolph near Aldgate, records unique for their wealth of detail albout sixteentlh-centtury life ancd death. Professor Forbes has described these hitherto unpublished records, given extracts from them, analyzed them, and placed them in their socio-historical and medical contexts. He has recognized and stressed the significant role of the clerks wllo, year after year, systematically observedl andl recorded the variouis incidents of medical-demographic significance in the parish. From the raw material whiclh those men left, he lhas reconstructed a revealing picture of the social milieu and ailments of the or(linary individual of that perio(l. Along with this, he has tabutlated the respective clhristeninlgs, blurials, andl death causes, and interpreted the resuilting data. To assist the twentieth-cenittury reader, Forbes has careftully edited and ac-cturately explainied the maniy obscture and archaic termns of the registers. In addition , lhe has uised secondary soturces effectively to fill ouit his chronicle. All in all, his work provides sutbstanitial background material for a better understanding of the remarkable mid-seventeentlh-century demographic innovations of John Graunt. WXhile the narrative sometimes jumps back and forth (lisconcertingly betweein the author's exposition and his extracts from the records, and while various of those extracts are over long, these are minor shortcomings. A somewhat more serious weakness is the book's failure to exploit the St. Botolplh records exclusively for a single class of readers, with the result that it may not completely satisfy any. However, this nonexclusiveness undeniably makes for broader appeal. As a hutman document as well as a scientific study, the work holds intrinsic interest for sociologists, genealogists, historians, and general readers, as well as for physicians and demographers.