In 1665 London's parishes published weekly bills of mortality listing the causes of death. The counts came from searchers of the dead, poor and often older women with no medical training, who examined bodies and reported what they thought had killed them. They were paid per body, and their contact with infected corpses often shortened their own lives. The bills, sold for a penny, were meant to show citizens where plague had spread, and they were part of a system introduced in 1592 to track and quarantine the disease. The bill for the week of 19 to 26 September 1665 recorded 7,165 plague deaths, though historians think the true count was higher because some groups were not recorded. Many listed causes, such as planet, suddenly or griping in the guts, were vague or astrological.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.