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But others actually traced the founding of epidemiology back even further to the 1300s.

When a Haberdasher named John Grant stylishly started analyzing the bills of mortality,

or records of every single death, or at least all the ones they could count back then, in

London.

He found that while the death rates for most things were pretty stable, mortality to the

plague came in spurts, outbreaks.

It was the first time anyone had looked at the patterns of disease at all.

Here's the thing, whether you think it was John Grant or John Snow who founded epidemiology,

who's probably found a by a dude named John, who happened to do it in London, a city.

Cities were important for two reasons.

First, because they were so densely packed, there were the kinds of places where infectious

diseases, which were overwhelmingly the leading causes of death back then, could move around.

And because they were so big, they didn't kill everyone in sight.

Think about it.

If an outbreak had hit a band of hunter-gatherers, it probably would have wiped out enough

of them that the group wouldn't have survived.

The very means of public health, managing the circumstances around us to promote health

and prevent disease, none of that happened until there were enough people in a single

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