ABSTRACT
The dominant model of disease we have had in Western developed societies has been that many diseases are caused by some encounter of the human body with some dangerous element ‘out there’ in Nature. This model applies primarily to our categories of infectious disease and deficiency disease, but it is pertinent also to a large extent also to degenerative diseases, which occupy a large part of our present-day disease landscape. Diagnosis always proceeds operatively or operationally, by people asking and answering one or more specific questions about the patient and his or her affliction. The Bills of Mortality were kept in London sporadically from the 1592 plague, and regularly from the 1603 plague. They are believed to have been started in order to inform the royal court and the rich residents of London when plague or other epidemics had reached such a state that flight from town was necessary.
