Bills of Mortality and the Birth of Epidemic Surveillance: Evidence, Uncertainty, and Decision-Making in Defoe's Plague Narrative.

By drawing parallels rather than following events exactly, we interpret Daniel Defoe's most important work as a literary response to the Bills of Mortality that foreshadows enduring concerns of epidemic surveillance. These include the aggregation of deaths in time and space, the interpretation of trends, and a persistent awareness of bias and uncertainty. We examine how Defoe's narrator "Henry Foe (H.F.)" reads, quotes, compares, and questions the weekly bills in the context of the Great Plague of London in 1665. He treats numerical data neither as transparent reality nor as mere ornament, but as contested evidence shaped by under-registration, diagnostic ambiguity, and pressure to minimize public alarm. Through close reading of selected passages, we show how H.F. juxtaposes printed figures with street-level observation, theological and humoral explanations, and contemporary debates on miasma, contagion, and quarantine. We do not claim that Defoe practiced surveillance in any modern sense. Rather, we argue that his narrative illuminates recurrent ethical and epistemological questions about data quality, transparency, trust, and the communication of risk. These questions have become newly salient amid recent preoccupations with dashboards, case counts, and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Defoe's journal thus offers historians of medicine and public health a sophisticated early case study of the promises and pitfalls of mortality statistics.