Let's take a step back and understand what we knew about CO at the time, then we'll answer the deaths, and reports related to it, as well as those of individuals dying for no apparent reason.

When did we 'discover' CO

We normally credit this to the English chemist Joseph Priestley sometime around the 1780s. This puts us mid Georgian Era (1714 – 1830) and pre-Victorian Era (1837 – 1901).

When did we 'discover' CO Poisoning?

We can argue we actually discovered CO poisoning long before we even knew what CO was. In David Penney's 2007 book "Carbon Monoxide Poisoning" (yup that's a thing), he has a list of historical benchmarks in the development of our understanding of CO poisoning.

The very first entry is a note from Aristotle in the third century noting that "coal fumes lead to a heavy head and death".

Key Historical Timeline for 'CO poisoning'

• From there we had Paracelsus (1500s) write about the disease of miners.

• The Flemish chemist and physician Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644) experiment with wood gas and charcoal nearly killing himself.

• Bernardino Ramazzini (1633 - 1714) wrote "De Morbis Arteficum" or the disease of miners and points to the danger of burning gases from coal.

• But it wasn't until 1775 where the French physician Harmant made the first clinical diagnosis of "Coal Gas Poisoning" and then in 1842 another French physician LeBlanc identified it as CO that was responsible for coal gas poisoning. Paper from LDS Hospital

Historical Context for Timeline

So late in the Victorian Era we began to realize that coal gas produced CO that could kill us - but well prior to that we knew that 'coal gas' could lead to death.

So do we have record of CO deaths from this Era?

Yes, although it seems they are sandwiched in with more general diagnosis. If we look at Annual report of the Registrar-General of births, deaths and marriages in England by Great Britain. General Register Office - 1837 starting with page 150 of the PDF you'll find a detailed list of causes of death for the city of London that year.

In section 6, caused 52 we have "Diseases of the Lung" that are separate from the main respiratory diseases. 210 male and 176 female individuals died from diseases of the lung that year.

That isn't to say that all of those deaths are indeed coal gas related, but, we do know that by this time period the medical diagnosis of coal gas was in practice, although we didn't know it was CO related.

Other Possibilities

One thing to research further is the listings for "Sudden death" of which 363 males and 313 females were listed as in London in 1837. From what I've found the listing of 'sudden death' historical is used when:

• The victim is discovered without disease.
• The victim is discovered without external marks of violence.
• The victim is not of old age.

While it likely includes individuals who died of things like heart attacks and aneurysms which we didn't fully understand back then, it also likely accounts for individuals who turned up dead in their homes from things like CO poisoning.

I'm having trouble finding individual medical reports or obituaries that go back that far online. You can find some slightly more modern ones on the Internet Archive Text's Collection, but, to fully answer your question I'd want to look at local medical/obituary records and see if some of those 'sudden death' ones matched descriptions of what we now know as CO poisoning.

Summary

We knew about CO poisoning quite a long time ago, but, we didn't call it that. We knew it as 'coal gas poisoning' and so we likely overlooked wood stoves and other culprits. Our first note of it actually comes from Aristotle.

It was considered to be an affliction of the lung derived from coal gas and was medically diagnosed as far back as 1775 in a formal medical practice that wasn't focused on mining.

It's not well recorded as the direct cause of death in this era, but, likely falls under the diseases of the lung category.

There are plenty of reports of individuals dying for no apparent reason, but, it is challenging to associate those directly with CO poisoning due to record keeping and different historical autopsy practices.