Age Patterns in Adult Mortality
Résumé
This chapter gives us the opportunity to revisit some of the work of the founding fathers of demographic science. While modern life tables usually begin with probabilities of death, n q x , the first life tables made in London during the seventeenth century began with counts from the Bills of Mortality. The first life tables were based on a very small amount of data, leading Edmund Halley (1656–1742) to conclude that the relationship between age and mortality described by his predecessors (Halley 1693) “has been only done by imaginary Valuation”.