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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
London, 11 March 1825 ‘When you say that sickness is incapable of valuation, you mean that there are no data whereon a calculation can be made?’
‘I mean that life and death are subject to a known law of nature, but that sickness is not, so that the occurrence of the one event may be foreseen and ascertained, but not so the other.’
Seldom does the irregular become regular before our very eyes. Yet here it is. The witness was John Finlaison. In March he testified as above. In April the MPs gave him a hard time. When they made their report in July:
Your Committee request particular attention to the evidence of Mr. Finlaison, Actuary to the National Debt Office, who having at his first examination before the Committee, signified an opinion that sickness does not follow any general law, and having, in consequence of suggestions from the Committee, paid further attention to the subject, has finally expressed his conviction, that sickness may be reduced to an almost certain law.
The Committee exaggerated. Finlaison did not come round. He did produce tables of sickness rates for various ages, for he was told to do so, but nothing can be more guarded than his surrounding prose: ‘If, in our present uncertainty as to the fact of the frequency and duration of Sickness among the labouring classes, we were permitted to assume, what may seem a reasonable hypothesis, the following might perhaps be hazarded, merely as speculation …’ His reaction to the new data appearing in the 1820s was to conclude, by 1829, that there is not even a law of mortality.
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