Free The Wench Is Dead by Colin Dexter Page B

Nessie's as she walked quickly around the beds.
    I’m so grateful,' said Morse. 'I really am! As I say it's… '
    'Yes,' said Christine softly.
    'Will you be in tomorrow?' asked Morse quickly.
    ‘No – not tomorrow. We've got some librarians coming from California-'
    'Come along now, please?
     
    Mrs Green, Sergeant Lewis, Christine Greenaway – now all of them gone; and already the medicine-trolley had been wheeled into the ward, and the nurses were starting out on yet another circuit of measurements and medicaments.
    And Morse felt sick at heart.
    It was at 9.20 p.m. that he finally settled back against his piled pillows to glance quickly through the photocopied material Christine had found for him. And soon he was deeply and happily engrossed – his temporary despondency departing on the instant.

Chapter Fourteen
Being in the land of the living was itself the survivor's privilege, for so many of one's peers – one's brothers and sisters – had already fallen by the wayside, having died at birth, at infancy or childhood
    (Roy & Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health)
     
    The documents which Morse now handled were just the thing (he had little doubt) for satisfying the original-source-material philosophy which was just then swamping the GCSE and A-level syllabuses. And for Morse, whose School Certificate in History (Credit) had demanded little more than semi-familiarity with the earliest models of seed-drills and similar agricultural adjuncts of the late eighteenth century, the reading of them was fascinating. Particularly poignant, as it appeared to Morse, was the Foreword to the Insurance Guide and Hand-Book 1860 (bless the girl! – she'd even got the exact year) where the anonymous author stated his own determination to soldier along in 'this vale of tears’for as long as decently possible:
    'Thus it is that all our efforts are forever required, not to surpass what we may call the biblical "par" for life – that famous "three-score years and ten" – but to come reasonably near to attaining it at all. For it is only by continuous vigilance and energy in the work for self preservation that the appointed average can be brought into view; and with good fortune and good sense (and God's grace) be achieved."
     
    It was interesting to find the Almighty in parenthesis, even in 1860, and Morse felt he would like to have known the author. Yet when that same author went on to assert that 'mortality had decreased by two-fifths between 1720 and 1820', Morse began to wonder what earth such a bafflingly unscientific – indeed, quite sensational statement might mean. What did seem immediately clear, as he read through the small print, that people during those years were beginning to live longer, and that by the middle of the nineteenth century insurance companies were beginning to match this sociological phenomenon with increasingly attractive rates and premiums, in spite of the sombre statistics appended: each year, right up to the 1850s. Like 1853, e.g. – the figures for which Morse now considered. Of the half million or departed souls reported in the pages of the Guide, 55,000 had died of consumption, 25,000 of pneumonia, 500 of convulsions, 23,000 of bronchitis, 20,000 of premature death and debility, 19,000 of typhus, 16,000 scarlatina, 15,000 of diarrhoea, 14,000 of heart disease, 12,000 of whooping cough, 11,000 of dropsy, 9,000 of apoplexy, 8,500 of paralysis, 6,000 of asthma, 5,750 of cancer, 4,000 of teeth troubles, 3,750 of measles, 3,500 of croup, 3,250 of small-pox, 3,000 of (mothers) giving birth; and so on to the smaller numbers succumbing to diseases of brain, kidney, liver, and other perishable parts of the anatomy – and to old age! As he added up such numbers quickly in his head, Morse realized that about two-thirds of the 500,000 were unaccounted for; and he had to assume that even with a few more categories added (‘murder' for one!) there must have been vast numbers of people in those days whose