It is difficult for those living in the industrialized countries of the twentieth century to imagine hunger and famine. But preindustrial Europe resembled nineteenth-century India more than it did nineteenthcentury Europe. The following is a description, chosen at random, of the scene that one would witness in a period of famine. The writer was a physician and the place was the northern Italian city of Bergamo in 1630:

The loathing and terror engendered by a maddened crowd of half-dead people who importune all comers in the streets, in the piazzas, in the churches, at street doors, so that life is intolerable, and in addition, the foul stench rising from them as well as the constant spectacle of the dying and the dead and particularly of people so maddened that it is impossible to escape their clutches without giving them alms, and if alms be given to one, a hundred will besiege the giver—this cannot be believed by anyone who has not experienced it.15

About the same time, a noble of Vincenza (northern Italy) wrote in a similar vein: Give alms to two hundred people and as many again will appear; you cannot walk down the street or stop in a square or church without multitudes surrounding you to beg for charity: you see hunger written on their faces, their eyes like gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodies with the skins shaped only by bones.

This excerpt is about disease/plague/illness in London:

It would be hard to estimate accurately the number of casualties from plague epidemics. In his famous Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, first published in 1662, John Graunt remarked “that the knowledge even of the numbers which dye of the plague is not sufficiently deduced from the mere report of the searchers” and that it was necessary to make “corrections upon the perhaps ignorant and careless searchers’ reports.”24 Sir William Petty, who liked to indulge in all kinds of exercises of “political arithmetic,” wrote in 1667 that

London within ye bills hath 696 thousand people in 108 thousand houses. In pestilential yeares, which are one in twenty, there dye one sixth of ye people of ye plague and one fifth of all diseases. The people which ye next plague of London will sweep away will be probably 120 thousand, which at £7 per head is a losse of 8,400 thousand.25

To translate ye-olde english, one in twenty years are disease yaers, one in sixth of people with plague die, one in five die of all disease. Of a population of 696 thousand, it's estimated there will be 120 thousand deaths in the next pestilence year.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4579864&forum_id=2#40572432)