Miss Franklin's claim rests upon an unexamined premise that I find not merely fragile but actively dangerous: the notion that people are better served by not knowing the shape of their mortality. I spent years in the aftermath of Scutari proving the opposite. When I placed before Parliament my polar-area diagrams — my 'coxcombs,' as they were called — I was told that presenting the precise figures of preventable death would demoralize both the Army and the public. The argument was identical to the one offered here: knowledge of death's pattern induces despair. And yet every ward reform that followed, every life saved in the subsequent decade, was purchased precisely because we refused that comfortable ignorance.
The psychological burden Miss Franklin fears is not an inherent property of the knowledge — it is a property of how knowledge is received in the absence of cultural preparation. Birthday rituals did not arrive fully formed; they accumulated meaning across centuries. Why should we assume that death-day observances, if they emerged naturally from confirmed foreknowledge, would calcify into dread rather than evolve into something more akin to the annual examination of one's affairs, one's relationships, one's debts both monetary and moral? I put it to you that such a day might produce not anxiety but accountability — a scheduled reckoning that our present culture conspicuously lacks, to the considerable harm of the dying and those who love them.
Miss Franklin is right that scientific conclusions demand rigour and testability — I shall not quarrel with that principle, it is the bedrock of all my statistical work. But she conflates the method of discovery with the desirability of the discovery. One may criticise the mechanism while remaining agnostic about the value of the outcome. Her argument against the psychological consequences of death-date knowledge is not a scientific claim at all — it is a social conjecture dressed in scientific authority, and I would ask her to submit it to the same scrutiny she rightly demands of any hypothesis.