The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume II (of 2), by Charles Creighton

A HISTORY
OF
EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN.

London: C. J. CLAY and SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AND
H. K. LEWIS,
136, GOWER STREET, W.C.

Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.

A HISTORY

OF

EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN

BY
CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D.,
FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

VOLUME II.

From the Extinction of Plague to the present time.

CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1894

[All rights reserved.]

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

[Pg v]

PREFACE.

This volume is the continuation of ‘A History of Epidemics in Britain from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague’ (which was published three years ago), and is the completion of the history to the present time. The two volumes may be referred to conveniently as the first and second of a ‘History of Epidemics in Britain.’ In adhering to the plan of a systematic history instead of annals I have encountered more difficulties in the second volume than in the first. In the earlier period the predominant infection was Plague, which was not only of so uniform a type as to give no trouble, in the nosological sense, but was often so dramatic in its occasions and so enormous in its effects as to make a fitting historical theme. With its disappearance after 1666, the field is seen after a time to be occupied by a numerous brood of fevers, anginas and other infections, which are not always easy to identify according to modern definitions, and were recorded by writers of the time, for example Wintringham, in so dry or abstract a manner and with so little of human interest as to make but tedious reading in an almost obsolete phraseology. Descriptions of the fevers of those times, under the various names of synochus, synocha, nervous, putrid, miliary, remittent, comatose, and the like, have been introduced into the chapter on Continued Fevers so as to show their generic as well as their differential character; but a not less important purpose of the chapter has been to illustrate the condition of the working classes, the unwholesomeness of towns, London in particular, the state of the gaols and of the navy, the seasons of dearth, the[Pg vi] times of war-prices or of depressed trade, and all other vicissitudes of well-being, of which the amount of Typhus and Relapsing Fever has always been a curiously correct index. It is in this chapter that the epidemiology comes into closest contact with social and economic history. In the special chapter for Ireland the association is so close, and so uniform over a long period, that the history may seem at times to lose its distinctively medical character.

As the two first chapters are pervaded by social and economic history, so each of the others will be found to have one or more points of distinctive interest besides the strictly professional. Smallpox is perhaps the most suitable of all the subjects in this volume to be exhibited in a continuous view, from the epidemics of it in London in the first Stuart reigns to the statistics of last year. While it shares with Plague the merit, from a historical point of view, of being always the same definite item in the bills of mortality, it can be shown to have experienced, in the course of two centuries and a half, changes in its incidence upon the classes in the community, upon the several age-periods and upon town and country, as well as a very marked change relatively to measles and scarlatina among the infective scourges of infancy and childhood. For certain reasons Smallpox has been the most favoured infectious disease, having claimed an altogether disproportionate share of interest at one time with Inoculation, at another time with Vaccination. The history of the former practice, which is the precedent for, or source of, a whole new ambitious scheme of prophylaxis in the infectious diseases of men and brutes, has been given minutely. The latter practice, which is a radical innovation inasmuch as it affects to prevent one disease by the inoculation of another, has been assigned as much space in the chapter on Smallpox as it seems to me to deserve. Measles and Whooping-cough are historically interesting, in that they seem to have become relatively more prominent among the infantile causes of death in proportion as the public health has improved. Whooping-cough is now left to head the list of its class by the shrinkage of the others. It is in the statistics of Measles and[Pg vii] Whooping-cough that the principle of population comes most into view. The scientific interest of Scarlatina and Diphtheria is mainly that of new, or at least very intermittent, species. Towards the middle of the 18th century there emerges an epidemic sickness new to that age, in which were probably contained the two modern types of Scarlet Fever and Diphtheria more or less clearly differentiated. The subsequent history of each has been remarkable: for a whole generation Scarlatina could prove itself a mild infection causing relatively few deaths, to become in the generation next following the greatest scourge of childhood; for two whole generations Diphtheria had disappeared from the observation of all but a few medical men, to emerge suddenly in its modern form about the years 1856-59.

The history of Dysentery, as told by the younger Heberden, has been a favourite instance of the steady decrease of a disease in London during the 18th century. I have shown the error in this, and at the same time have proved from the London bills of mortality of the 17th and 18th centuries that Infantile Diarrhoea, which is now one of the most important causes of death in some of the great manufacturing and shipping towns, was formerly still more deadly to the infancy of the capital in a hot summer or autumn. Asiatic Cholera brings us back, at the end of the history, to the same great problem which the Black Death of the 14th century raised near the beginning of it, namely, the importation of the seeds of pestilence from some remote country, and their dependence for vitality or effectiveness in the new soil upon certain favouring conditions, which sanitary science has now happily in its power to withhold. I have left Influenza to be mentioned last. Its place is indeed unique among epidemic diseases; it is the oldest and most obdurate of all the problems in epidemiology. The only piece of speculation in this volume will be found in the five-and-twenty pages which follow the narrative of the various historical Influenzas; it is purely tentative, exhibiting rather the disjecta membra of a theory than a compact and finished hypothesis. If there is any new light thrown upon the subject, or new point of view opened, it is in[Pg viii] bringing forward in the same context the strangely neglected history of Epidemic Agues.

Other subjects than those which occupy the nine chapters of this volume might have been brought into a history of epidemics, such as Mumps, Chickenpox and German Measles, Sibbens and Button Scurvy, together with certain ordinary maladies which become epidemical at times, such as Pneumonia, Erysipelas, Quinsy, Jaundice, Boils and some skin-diseases. While none of these are without pathological interest, they do not lend themselves readily to the plan of this book; they could hardly have been included except in an appendix of miscellanea curiosa, and I have preferred to leave them out altogether. It has been found necessary, also, to discontinue the history of Yellow Fever in the West Indian and North American colonies, which was begun in the former volume.

I have, unfortunately for my own labour, very few acknowledgements to make of help from the writings of earlier workers in the same field. My chief obligation is to the late Dr Murchison’s historical introduction to his ‘Continued Fevers of Great Britain.’ I ought also to mention Dr Robert Willan’s summary of the throat-distempers of the 18th century, in his ‘Cutaneous Diseases’ of 1808, and the miscellaneous extracts relating to Irish epidemics which are appended in a chronological table to Sir W. R. Wilde’s report as Census Commissioner for Ireland. For the more recent history, much use has naturally been made of the medical reports compiled for the public service, especially the statistical.

September, 1894.

[Pg ix]

CONTENTS.

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I.

TYPHUS AND OTHER CONTINUED FEVERS.

It was remarked by Dr James Lind, in 1761, that a judicious synopsis of the writings on fevers, in a chronological sense, would be a valuable book: it would bring to light, he was fain to expect, treasures of knowledge; “and perhaps the influence of a favourite opinion, or of a preconceived fancy, on the writings of some even of our best instructors, such as Sydenham and Morton, would more clearly be perceived[1].” Lind himself was the person to have delivered such a history and criticism. He was near enough to the 17th century writers on fevers to have entered correctly into their points of view; while so far as concerned the detection of theoretical bias or preconceived fancies, he had shown himself a master of the art in his famous satire upon the “scorbutic constitution,” a verbal or mythical construction which had been in great vogue for a century and a half, and was still current, at the moment when Lind destroyed it, in the writings of Boerhaave and Haller. A judicious historical view of the English writings on fevers, such as this 18th century critic desired to see, may now be thought superfluous. The theories, the indications for treatment, the medical terms, have passed away and become the mere objects of a learned curiosity. But the actual history of the old fevers, of their kinds, their epidemic prevalence, their incidence upon rich or poor, upon children or adults, their fatality, their contagiousness, their connexion with the seasons and other vicissitudes of the people—all this is something more than curious.

[Pg 2]Unfortunately for the historian of diseases, he has to look for the realities amidst the “favourite opinions” or the “preconceived fancies” of contemporary medical writers. Statements which at first sight appear to be observations of matters of fact are found to be merely the necessary truths or verbal constructions of some doctrine. One great doctrine of the 17th and 18th centuries was that of obstructions: in this doctrine, as applied to fevers, obstructions of the mesentery were made of central importance; the obstructions of the mesentery extended to its lymphatic glands; so that we come at length, in a mere theoretical inference, to something not unlike the real morbid anatomy of enteric fever. Another great doctrine of the time, specially applied by Willis to fevers, was that of fermentations and acrimonies. “This ferment,” says a Lyons disciple of Willis in 1682, “has its seat in the glandules of the velvet coat of the stomach and intestines described by Monsieur Payer[2].” But the Lyons physician is writing all the while of the fevers that have always been common in the Dombes and Bresse, namely intermittents; the tertian, double tertian, quotidian, quartan, or double quartan paroxysm arises, he says, from the coagulation of the humours by the ferment which has its seat in the glandules described by M. Payer, even as acids cause a coagulation in milk, the paroxysm of ague continuing, “until this sharp chyle be dissipated and driven out by the sweat or insensible perspiration.” The lymphatic follicles of the intestine known by the name of Payer, or Peyer, were then the latest anatomical and physiological novelty, and were chosen, on theoretical grounds, as the seat of fermentation or febrile action in agues. On the ground of actual observation they were found about a century and a half after to be the seat of morbid action in typhoid fever.

While there are such pitfalls for the historian in identifying the several species of fevers in former times, there are other difficulties of interpretation which concern the varieties of a continued fever, or its changes of type from generation to generation. Is change of type a reality or a fiction? And, if a reality, did it depend at all upon the use or abuse of a certain regimen or treatment, such as blooding and lowering, or heating and corroborating? A pupil of Cullen, who wrote his thesis in[Pg 3] 1782 upon the interesting topic of the change in fevers since the time of Sydenham[3], inferred that the great physician of the Restoration could not have had to treat the low, putrid or nervous fevers of the middle and latter part of the 18th century, otherwise he would not have resorted so regularly to blood-letting, a practice which was out of vogue in continued fevers at the time when the thesis was written, as well as for a good many years before and after. Fevers, it was argued, had undergone a radical change since the time of Sydenham, in correspondence with many changes in diet, beverages and creature comforts, such as the greatly increased use of tea, coffee and tobacco, and of potatoes or other vegetables in the diet, changes also in the proportion of urban to rural population, in the use of carriages, and in many other things incident to the progressive softening of manners. In due time the low, putrid, nervous type of typhus fever, which is so much in evidence in the second half of the 18th century, ceased to be recorded, an inflammatory type, or a fever of strong reaction, taking its place; so that Bateman, of London, writing in 1818, said: “The putrid pestilential fevers of the preceding age have been succeeded by the milder forms of infectious fever which we now witness”; while Armstrong, Clutterbuck, and others, who had revived the practice of blood-letting in fevers shortly before the epidemic of 1817-18, claimed the comparatively slight fatality and short duration of the common fever of the time as an effect of the treatment. After 1831, typhus again became low, depressed, spotted, not admitting of the lancet; on which occasion the doctrine of “change of type” was debated in the form that the older generation of practitioners still remember.

Thus the task of the historian, whose first duty is to ascertain, if he can, the actual matters of fact, or the realities, in their sequence or chronological order, is made especially difficult, in the chapter on continued fevers, by the contemporary influence of theoretical pathology or “a preconceived fancy,” by the ascription of modifying effects to treatment, whether cooling or heating, lowering or supporting, and, most of all, by the absence of that more exact method which distinguishes the records of fever in our own time. Nor can it be said that the work of historical research has been made easier in all respects, by the[Pg 4] exact discrimination and perfected diagnosis to which we are accustomed in present-day fevers. In the years between 1840 and 1850, the three grand types of fever then existing in Britain, namely, spotted typhus, enteric, and relapsing fever, were at length so clearly distinguished, defined and described that no one remained in doubt or confusion. Thereupon arose the presumption that these had always been the forms of continued fever in Britain, and that the same fevers, presumably in the same relative proportions to each other, might have been left on record by the physicians of former generations, if they had used the modern exactness and minuteness in observing both clinical history and anatomical state, which were seen at their best in Sir William Jenner. It would simplify history, indeed it would make history superfluous, if that were really the case. There are many reasons for believing that it was not the case. As Sydenham looked forward to his successors having experiences that he never had, so we may credit Sydenham with having really seen things which we never see, not even those of us who saw the last epidemics of relapsing fever and typhus. It is due to him, and to his contemporaries and nearest successors, to reciprocate the spirit in which he concludes the general chapter on epidemics prefatory to his annual constitutions from 1661 to 1676:

“I am far from taking upon myself the credit of exhausting my subject in the present observations. It is highly probable that I may fail even in the full enumeration of the epidemics. Still less do I warrant that the diseases which during the years in question have succeeded each other in the sequence about to be exhibited shall remain the same in all future years. One thing most especially do I aim at. It is my wish to state how things have gone lately; how they have been in this country, and how they have been in this the city which we live in. The observations of some years form my ground-work. It is thus that I would add my mite, such as it is, towards the foundation of a work that, in my humble judgment, shall be beneficial to the human race. Posterity will complete it, since to them it shall be given to take the full view of the whole cycle of epidemics in their mutual sequences for years yet to come[4].”

The epidemic fever of 1661, according to Willis.

On the very threshold of the period at which the history is resumed in this volume, we find a minute account by Willis of an epidemic in the year 1661, which at once raises the question whether a certain species of infectious fever did really exist at[Pg 5] that time which exists no longer, or whether Willis described as “a fever of the brain and nervous stock” what we now call enteric fever. Willis’s fever corresponds in every respect to the worm fever, the comatose fever, the remittent fever of children, the acute fever with dumbness, the convulsive fever, which was often recorded by the medical annalists and other systematic observers as late as the beginning of the 19th century[5]. It ceased at length to be recorded or described, and it has been supposed that it was really the infantile or children’s part of enteric fever, which had occurred in former times as now[6]. The epidemic fever which Willis saw in the summer of 1661, after a clear interval of two years from the great epidemics of agues, with influenzas, in 1657-59, is called by him “a certain irregular and unaccustomed fever[7].” It was not, however, new to him altogether; for he had seen the same type, and kept notes of the cases, in a particular household at Oxford in 1655, as well as on other occasions. It was an epidemical fever “chiefly infestous to the brain and nervous stock.” It raged mostly among children and youths, and was wont to affect them with a long and, as it were, a chronical sickness. When it attacked the old or middle-aged, which was more rarely, it did sooner and more certainly kill. It ran through whole families, not only in Oxford and the neighbouring parts, “but in the countries at a great distance, as I heard from physicians dwelling in other places.” Among those other witnesses, we shall call Sydenham; but meanwhile let us hear Willis, whose account is the fullest and least warped by theory.

The prolonged series of cases in the household of this “venerable man” appears to have made a great impression upon Willis, as something new in his experience, as well as in the experience of several other physicians who gave their services. That it was malignant he considers proved “ex contagio, pernicie, macularum pulicularum apparentia, multisque aliis indiciis.” He adds that he had seen the same disease sporadically at other times; and again “I remember that formerly several laboured under such a fever.” Those cases were all previous to the general prevalence of the fever which he identifies with them in the summer of 1661, under the name of a “fever of the brain and spinal cord.”

The signs given by Willis are as nearly as may be the signs of infantile remittent fever, or worm fever, or febris synochus puerorum, or hectica infantilis, or febris lenta infantum, or an acute fever with dumbness, of which perhaps the first systematic account in this country was given by Dr William Butter of Lower Grosvenor Street, in 1782[11]. It is, he says, both a sporadical and an epidemical disease, “and when epidemical it is also contagious.” The age for it is from birth up to puberty; but “similar symptoms are often observed in the disorders of adults.” Morton, writing in 1692-94, clearly points to the same fever under the name of worm fever (febris verminosa). He adds it at the very end of his scheme of fevers, as if in an appendix, having been unable to find a place for it in any of his categories owing to its varying forms—hectic, acute, intermittent, continued, συνεχής, inflammatory, but for the most part colliquative or σύνοχος, “and malignant according to the varying degrees of the venomous miasm causing it[12].” Butter also recognizes its varying types: it has many symptoms, but they seldom all occur in the same case; there are three main varieties—the acute, lasting from eight to ten days up to two or three weeks;[Pg 8] the slow, lasting two or three months; and the low, lasting a month or six weeks. The slow form, he says, is only sporadic; the low is only epidemic, and is never seen but when the acute is also epidemical; it is rare in comparison with the latter, and not observed at all except in certain of the epidemical seasons. Waiving the question whether the remittent fever of children, thus systematically described, was not a composite group of maladies, of which enteric fever of children was one, we can hardly doubt that Willis found a distinctive uniform type in the epidemic of 1661, in Oxford as he saw it himself, in other parts of England by report. It had symptoms which were not quite clearly those of enteric fever: spots, like fleabites, on the neck and other parts, swelling and suppuration of the glands in the hinder part of the neck, effusion of fluid on the brain and in the lateral ventricles, and the intestine free from disease[13].

Confirming Willis’s account for Oxford, is the case of Roger North, when a boy at Bury St Edmunds Free School in 1661, as related by himself in his ‘Autobiography[14].’ Being then “very young and small,” after a year at school he had “an acute fever, which endangered a consumption.” Elsewhere he attributes his bad memory with “confusion and disorder of thought,” to that “cruel fit of sickness I had when young, wherein, I am told, life was despaired of, and it was thought part of me was dead; and I can recollect that warm cloths were applied, which could be for no other reason, because I had not gripes which commonly calls for that application.” That “great violence of nature,” while it had impaired his mental faculties, had sapped his bodily vigour somewhat also, of which he gives a singular illustration.

This special prevalence of epidemic fevers in the summer and autumn of 1661 is noticed also by the London diarists.

Evelyn says that the autumn of 1661 was exceedingly sickly and wet[15]. Pepys has several entries of fever[16]. On 2 July, 1661: “Mr Saml. Crewe died of the spotted fever.” On 16 August: “At the [Navy] Office all the morning, though little to do;[Pg 9] because all our clerks are gone to the burial of Tom Whitton, one of our Controller’s clerks, a very ingenious and a likely young man to live as any in the office. But it is such a sickly time both in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was heard of almost, unless it was in a plague-time. Among others the famous Tom Fuller [of the ‘Worthies of England’] is dead of it; and Dr Nichols [Nicholas], Dean of St Paul’s; and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill.” On 31 August: “The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal fevers.” On 15 January, 1662: “Hitherto summer weather, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow; for so it was almost the last winter, and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day.”

The great medical authority of the time is Sydenham. His accounts of the seasons and reigning diseases of London extend from 1661 to 1686, so that they begin with the year for which Willis described the epidemic fever “chiefly infestous to the brain and nervous stock,” popularly called the new disease. But Sydenham did not describe the epidemic in the same objective way that Willis did. He records a series of “epidemic constitutions of the air,” the particular constitution of each year being named from the epidemic malady that seemed to him to dominate it most. It was, perhaps, because it had to conform to Sydenham’s “preconceived fancy,” as Lind said, that his account of the dominant type of fever in 1661 differs somewhat from that given by Willis.

Sydenham’s epidemic Constitutions.

Sydenham adopted the epidemic constitutions from Hippocrates, as he did much else in his method and practice. In the first and third books of the ‘Epidemics,’ Hippocrates describes three successive seasons and their reigning diseases in the island of Thasos, as well as a fourth plague-constitution which agrees exactly with the facts of the plague of Athens as described by Thucydides. The Greek term translated “constitution” is κατάστασις, which means literally a settling, appointing; ordaining, and in the epidemiological sense means the type of reigning disease as settled by the season. The method of Hippocrates is first to give an account of the weather—the winds,[Pg 10] the rains, the temperature and the like,—and then to describe the diseases of the seasons[17]. Sydenham followed his model with remarkable closeness. The great plague of London has almost the same place in his series of years that the plague-constitution, the fourth in order, has in that of Hippocrates. It looks, indeed, as if Sydenham had begun with the year 1661, more for the purpose of having several constitutions preceding that of the plague than because he had any full observations of his own to record previous to 1665. He is also much influenced by the example of Hippocrates in giving prominence to the intermittent type of fevers. It was remarked by one of our best 18th century epidemiologists, Rogers of Cork, and with special reference to Sydenham’s “intermittent constitutions,” that fevers proper to the climate of Thasos were not likely to be identified in or near London excepted by a forced construction.

Sydenham’s Constitutions.

[Pg 11]The foregoing is a Table of Sydenham’s epidemic constitutions from 1661 to 1686, compiled from his various writings, with the corresponding statistics from the London Bills of Mortality.

I give this Table both as a convenient outline and in deference to the great name of Sydenham. But we should be much at fault in interpreting the figures of the London Bills, or the history of epidemic diseases in the country at large, if we had no other sources of information than his writings. Only some of the figures in the Table concern us in this chapter; plague has been finished in the previous volume, smallpox, measles and “griping in the guts” are reserved each for a separate chapter, as well as the influenzas and epidemic agues which formed the chief part of the “strange” or “new” fevers. If this work had been the Annals of Epidemics in Britain, it would have been at once proper and easy to follow Sydenham’s constitutions exactly, and to group under each year the information collected from all sources about all epidemic maladies. But as the work is a history, it proceeds, as other histories do, in sections, observing the chronological order and the mutual relations of epidemic types as far as possible; and in this section of it we have to cull out and reduce to order the facts relating to fevers, beginning with those of 1661.

Cases of fever, says Sydenham, began to be epidemic about the beginning of July 1661, being mostly tertians of a bad type, and became so frequent day by day that in August they were raging everywhere, and in many places made a great slaughter of people, whole families being seized. This was not an ordinary tertian intermittent; indeed no one but Sydenham calls it an intermittent at all, and he qualifies the intermittence as follows:

The intermittent character of these fevers seems to have struck Sydenham himself in a later work as forced and unreal. Writing in 1680, when the same kind of fevers were prevalent, after the epidemic agues of 1678 and 1679, he calls them “depuratory,” and says that “doubtless those depuratory fevers which reigned in 1661-64 were as if the dregs of the intermittents which raged sometime before during a series of years,” i.e. the agues of 1657-59[18].

Theory or names apart, Sydenham’s account of the fatal epidemic fever of the summer and autumn of 1661, comes to nearly the same as Willis’s. Without saying expressly, as Willis does, that the victims were mostly children or young people, he speaks in one place of those of more mature years lying much longer in the fever, even to three months, and he specially mentions the same sequelae of the fever in children that Willis mentions, and that Roger North remembered in his own case—namely that they sometimes became hectic, with bellies distended and hard, and often acquired a cough and other consumptive symptoms, “which clearly put one in mind of rickets.” He refers also to pain and swelling of the tonsils and to difficulty of swallowing, which, if followed by hoarseness, hollow eyes, and the facies Hippocratica, portended speedy death. Among the numerous other accidentia of the fever, was a certain kind of mania. Among the symptoms were phrensy, and coma-vigil; diarrhœa occurred in some owing, as he thought, to the omission of an emetic at the outset; hiccup and bleeding at the nose were occasional.

But, although Sydenham must have had the same phenomena of fever before him that Willis had, the epidemic being general, according to the statements of both, one would hardly guess from his way of presenting the facts, that the fever was what Willis took it to be—a slow nervous fever, with convulsive and ataxic symptoms, specially affecting children and the young. Both Willis and Sydenham recognised something new in it; the common people called it, once more, the “new disease,” and Pepys calls it a “sort of fever,” and “strange and fatal fevers.”

[Pg 13]As Sydenham maintains that the same epidemic constitution continued until 1664 (although the fever-deaths in London are much fewer in 1662-3-4 than in the year 1661, which was the first of it), we may take in the same connexion Pepys’s account of the Queen’s attack of fever in 1663. The young princess Katharine of Portugal, married to Charles II. in 1662, had the beginning of a fever at Whitehall about the middle of October, 1663; Pepys enters on the 19th that her pulse beat twenty to eleven of the king’s, that her head was shaved, and pigeons put to her feet, that extreme unction was given her (the priests so long about it that the doctors were angry). On the 20th he hears that the queen’s sickness is a spotted fever, that she was as full of the spots as a leopard: “which is very strange that it should be no more known, but perhaps it is not so.” On the 22nd the queen is worse, 23rd she slept, 24th she is in a good way to recovery, Sir Francis Prujean’s cordial having given her rest; on the 26th “the delirium in her head continues still; she talks idle, not by fits, but always, which in some lasts a week after so high a fever, in some more, and in some for ever.” On the 27th she still raves and talks, especially about her imagined children; on the 30th she continues “light-headed, but in hopes to recover.” On 7th December, she is pretty well, and goes out of her chamber to her little chapel in the house; on the 31st “the queen after a long and sore sickness is become well again.”

Typhus fever perennial in London.

Sydenham says that a continued fever, the symptoms of which so far as he gives them suggest typhus, was mixed with the masked intermittent, (or the convulsive fever of children, as in Willis’s account), in every one of the years 1661-4; and that statement raises a question which may be dealt with here once for all. Fever in the London bills is a steady item from year to year, seldom falling below a thousand deaths and in the year 1741, during a general epidemic of typhus, rising to 7500. The fevers were a composite group, as we have seen, and shall see more clearly. But the bulk of them perennially appears to have been typhus fever. Where the name of “spotted fever” is given there can be little doubt. Every year the bills have a small number of deaths from “spotted fever,” and the number of them[Pg 14] always rises in the weekly bills in proportion to the increase of “fever” in general, sometimes reaching twenty in the week when the other fevers reach a hundred. It would be a mistake to suppose that only the fevers called spotted were typhus, the other and larger part being something else. The more reasonable supposition is that the name of spotted was given by the searchers in cases where the spots, or vibices or petechiae of typhus were especially notable. If a score, or a dozen or half-a-dozen deaths in a week are set down to spotted fever, it probably means that a large part of the remaining hundred, or seventy, or fifty cases of “fever” not called spotted were really of the same kind, namely typhus. In the plague itself, the “tokens,” which were of the same haemorrhagic nature as the larger or more defined spots of typhus, were exceedingly variable[19]. One of the synonyms of typhus (the common name in Germany) is spotted typhus; but the spots were of at least two kinds, a dusky mottling of the skin and more definite spots, sometimes large, sometimes like fleabites.

Assuming that the cases specially called “spotted” in the London Bills were only a part of all that might have been called by the same name in the wider acceptation of the term (as in Germany), it is a significant fact that there are few of the weekly bills for a long series of years in the 17th and 18th centuries without some of the former. Such a case as that of Mr Samuel Crewe, brother of Lord Crewe, who died of the “spotted fever” on 2 July, 1661, probably means that there were more cases of the same kind in the poorer parts of the town, from which no account of the reigning sicknesses ever came unless it were the number of deaths in the bills. The conditions of endemic typhus were there long before we have authentic accounts, towards the end of the 18th century, of that disease being ever present in the homes of the lower classes. In the time of Sydenham, and even in the time of Huxham two generations after, there was no thought of the unwholesome domestic life graphically described by Willan and others, as a cause of typhus—the overcrowding, the want of ventilation, the foul bedding and the excremental effluvia.

If there had been any reason to suppose that the London of the Restoration, or of the time of Queen Anne, or of the first[Pg 15] Georges had enjoyed better public health in its crowded liberties and out-parishes than we know it to have done from the time when the authentic accounts of Lettsom and other dispensary physicians begin, then one might err in assuming the perennial existence of typhus fever and in assigning to that cause the bulk of the deaths under the heading of “fevers” in the Parish Clerks’ bills. But the public health was undoubtedly worse in the earlier period. A writer as late as the year 1819, who is calling for that reform of the dwellings of the working classes in London which was soon after carried out, namely the construction of regular streets instead of mazes of courts and alleys, speaks of the “silent mortality” that went on in the latter[20]. It was still more silent in earlier times, when the west end of London knew nothing of what was passing in the east end[21].

In all matters of public health, after the somewhat romantic interest in plague had ceased, the poorer parts of London were for long an unexplored territory. Dr John Hunter, who had been an army physician and was afterwards in practice in Mayfair, began about the year 1780 to visit the homes of the poor in St Giles’s or other parishes near him, and was surprised to find in them a fever not unlike the hospital typhus of his military experience. I quote at this stage only a sentence or two[22].

The “constitution” in Sydenham’s series which succeeded the febrile one of 1661-64 was “pestilential fever.” It began in the end of 1664, lasted into the spring of 1665, and passed by an easy transition into the plague proper. The bills for those months have very large weekly totals of deaths from “fever,” as well as a good many deaths from “spotted fever,” before they begin to have more than an occasional death from plague. It is[Pg 16] this particular form of typhus fever that Bateman had in mind when he wrote, in 1818, “We never see the pestilential fever of Sydenham and Huxham”; although Willan, who preceded him at the Carey Street dispensary, described in 1799 a fever of so fatal a type that it gave rise to the rumour that the plague was back in London. The term “pestilential” was technically applied to a kind of fever a degree worse than the “malignant.”

Willis, the earliest of the Restoration authorities on fevers, had three names in an ascending scale of severity—putrid, malignant and pestilential. The putrid fevers were what we might call idiopathic, engendered within the body in some way personal to the individual from “putrefaction” or fermentation of the humours; all the intermittents were included in that class, and the theory of their cure by bark was that the drug corrected putridity. In the malignant and pestilential, an altogether new element came in—the τὸ θεῖον of Hippocrates, the mysterious something which we call infection; and of these two infectious fevers, the malignant was milder than the pestilential[23].

Morton drew out the scale of fevers in an elaborate classification, of which only the last section of continued contagious fevers concerns us at present[24]:

The order in this Table was also the order in time: the fever of 1661, which Willis calls malignant, remained as the constitution[Pg 17] of the years following until the end of 1664; then began the pestilential, which passed definitely in the spring of 1665 into the plague proper. Willis, Sydenham and Morton, differing as they did on many points of theory and treatment, all alike taught the scale of malignity in fevers and plague, and all used the language of “constitutions.” The Great Plague of 1665 was, in their view, the climax of a succession of febrile constitutions of the air, being attended by much pestilential fever and followed by a fever which Morton places in the milder class of συνεχής.

The epidemic Constitutions following the Great Plague.

During the ten or twelve years following the Great Plague of London, the epidemic maladies which Sydenham dwelt most upon as the reigning types will appear on close scrutiny to have been on the whole proper to the earlier years of life. This cannot be shown in the simple way of figures; for the ages at death from the several maladies, although they were in the books of the Parish Clerks, were not published.

There was some continued fever every year, which we may take to have been chiefly the endemic typhus of a great city, and there were also deaths among adults due to those reigning epidemics which fell most on the young. In 1667 and 1668 the leading epidemic was smallpox, with a continued fever towards the end of the period which Sydenham called “variolous,” for no other reason, apparently, than that it was part of a variolous constitution. In the autumn of 1669, and in the three years following, the epidemic mortality was peculiarly infantile, in the form of diarrhoea or “griping in the guts,” with some dysentery of adults, and some measles in 1670. From 1673 to 1676, the constitution was a comatose fever, which chiefly affected children, with a sharp epidemic of measles in the first half of 1674, attended by a very high mortality from all causes, and a severe smallpox in the second half of 1674, attended by a much lower mortality from all causes. There was also an influenza for a few weeks in 1675. In 1678 the “intermittent” constitution returned, having been absent for thirteen years, and continued through 1779-80, until its “strength was broken.” In 1681 smallpox was unusually mortal, the deaths being more than in any previous year. Most of these constitutions fall to be dealt with fully in[Pg 18] other chapters: but as we are here specially concerned with the succession to the plague, it is to be noted how largely the epidemic mortality in London fell upon the age of childhood for a number of years after the Great Plague of 1665. It was observed both by English and foreign writers that the next epidemic following the Black Death of 1348-49, namely, that of 1361 in England and of 1359-60 in some other parts of Europe, fell mostly upon children and upon the upper classes of adults. There is doubtless some particular application of the population principle in the earlier instance as in the later, but not the same application in both. The conditions at the beginning of the three hundred years’ reign of plague in Britain were different from those at the end of it. The increased prevalence of smallpox in the generation before the last great outburst of plague, and the infantile or puerile character of the epidemic fever of 1661, as described by Willis, show that the incidence of infectious mortality had already begun to shift towards the age of childhood. It looks as if the conditions of population, intricate and obscure as they must be confessed to be, were somehow determining what the reigning infectious maladies, with their special age-incidence, should be. Such a gradual change is the more probable for the reason that infectious mortality came in due time to be mostly an affair of childhood. The plague, which was the great infection of the later medieval and earlier modern period, was peculiarly fatal to adult lives; on the other hand, the mortality from infectious diseases in our own time falls in much the larger ratio upon infants and children. It looks as if this change, now so obvious, had begun before the end of plague in Britain, having become more marked in the generation following its extinction. The direct successor of plague, so far as concerns age-incidence and nosological affinity, was the pestilential or malignant typhus, which came into great prominence in 1685-86, in circumstances that seemed to contemporaries to forebode a return of the plague. But before we come to that, there remains a little to be said of some other fevers, especially of the comatose fever of 1673-76, which was largely an affair of childhood.

Pepys says that he went on 3 May, 1668, to Old Street (St Luke’s) to see Admiral Sir Thomas Teddiman, “who is very ill in bed of a fever,” and, in a later entry, that he “did die by a thrush in his mouth” on the 12th of May. Next year, 1669, [Pg 19]Pepys and his wife went on tour through several parts of Europe, and had hardly returned to their house in Seething Lane when the lady fell ill of a fever; on 2nd November, it was “so severe as to render her recovery desperate,” and on 10th November she died, in her 29th year,—a surprising sequel, as her husband felt, to a “voyage so full of health and content.” These two years, for which we have a sample of the London fevers, were marked in the Netherlands by epidemics of fevers which are among the most extraordinary in the whole history. At Leyden in 1669 the fever reached such a height as to cut off 7000—a mortality which would not have been surprising if the disease had been plague; but it was not plague, it wanted the buboes, carbuncles &c., was longer in its course, and, strangest of all, affected the upper classes far more severely than the poor, so much so “that of seventy men administering the public affairs, scarcely two were left[25],” while, according to Fanois, who was the Leyden poor’s doctor, the lower classes, “protected as it were by having survived the simpler forms of fever,” suffered from this malignant epidemic far less than the rich[26]. The mortality is said to have risen as high as three-fourths of the attacks. At Haarlem the burials in a week rose to three or four hundred (which was a fair week’s average for London itself in an ordinary season), the epidemic lasting four months and leaving hardly one family untouched. Among the symptoms were extreme praecordial anxiety, weight at the pit of the stomach, constant nausea and loathing, vomiting, in part bilious but chiefly “pituitous,” thirst and restless tossing. It was attended by an affection of the throat and mouth—an angina with aphthae or thrush of the palate. The pools and other sources of water for domestic use were unusually stagnant that summer in Holland, and were commonly blamed for the epidemic; but Fanois points out that at Haarlem and Emden, where similar fevers raged, “salubriores non desunt aquae[27].”

[Pg 20]After such an instance as the Leyden fever of 1669, nothing is incredible in the records of fever subsequent to the extinction of plague. Turning to Sydenham’s account of the continued fever which occurred in London during the same season, the latter half of 1669, as well as in the three years following, we find that it was characterized rarely by diarrhoea or sweats, commonly by pain in the head, by a moist white tongue which afterwards became covered by a dense skin, and by a greater tendency than Sydenham had ever seen to aphthae (the “thrush in the mouth” of Admiral Teddiman in 1668) when death threatened—the same being a “deposition from the blood of foul and acrid matter upon the mouth and throat.” But London in 1668 and 1669 suffered little from fevers in comparison to Leyden, Haarlem and other Dutch towns, its high mortality in the summer and autumn of 1669 being from infantile diarrhoea, cholera nostras and dysentery.

Sydenham’s continued fever from 1673 to 1676 (he was absent from his practice in 1677 owing to ill health) was a malady which affected adults as well as children, but, it would appear, the latter especially. The only characteristic case given is of a boy of nine who did not begin to mend until the thirtieth day. Many recovered in a fortnight, while others were not clear of the fever in a month. On account of the remarkable stupor which almost always attended it, Sydenham called the fever of this constitution a comatose fever. It began with sharp pains in the head and back, pains in the limbs, heats and chills, etc. His account of the comatose state is exactly like that given by Willis for the fever of children in 1661—profound stupor, sometimes for a week long, so profound in some as to pass into absolute aphonia (the “acute fever with dumbness” of later writers), while others would talk a few words in their sleep, or would seem to be angry or perturbed by something (the chimaeras mentioned by Willis) and would then become tranquil again; when roused to take physic or to drink they would open the eyes for a moment and then fall back into stupor. When they began to mend, they would crave for absurd things to eat or drink. During convalescence the head, through weakness, could not be kept straight but would incline first to one side and then to the other[28].

[Pg 21]The years 1678-1680 witnessed remarkable epidemics of ague, such as had occurred on several occasions before, the last in the years 1657-59. They engross so much of Sydenham’s writing, especially in connexion with the Peruvian-bark controversy, that we hear little of any other fever until the great epidemic of continued fever, or typhus, in 1685-6. But he does mention briefly that the interval between the decline of the agues in 1680 and the beginning of the “new fever” of 1685, was occupied by “continued depuratory” fevers—depuratory of the dregs of the preceding intermittent constitution, and comparable in that respect to the fevers of 1661-64 which followed the agues of 1657-59[29].

Sydenham’s term “depuratory” does not help us much; but we learn something from Morton as to what fevers were prevalent, besides the epidemical intermittents, in the years preceding the epidemic of 1685-86. Morton classes them as continued συνεχής (Synocha), by which he means something less malignant than Synochus. A fever which began in the milder form would often degenerate into the more malignant, the cause assigned, in the usual recriminatory manner of the time between rival schools, being mistaken treatment. But sometimes the fever was malignant from the outset, with purple spots, petechiae, morbillous efflorescence, watery vesicles on the neck and breast, buboes, and anthraceous boils. All these fevers, says Morton, whether they were spurious forms of synocha, or malignant from the outset, were sporadic, “neque contagione, ut in pestilentiali constitutione, sese propagabant[30].” This points to their having been part of that strange aguish epidemic of which an account is given in another chapter. In Short’s abstracts of parish registers, the year 1680 seems to have been the most unhealthy of the series in country parishes, and that is borne out by one Lamport, or Lampard, an empiric who practised in Hampshire: “I will tell you somewhat concerning a malignant fever. In the year ’80 or ’81 there were great numbers of people died of such fevers, many whereby were taken with vomitings, etc., yet I had the good fortune to cure eighteen in the parish of Aldingbourn, not one dying, in that great compass, of that disease[31].” The moral is that the empiric recovered his[Pg 22] cases, whereas the regular faculty lost theirs; which means that the fevers were of various degrees, some aguish, some typhus, as in the exactly similar circumstances a century after, 1780-85.

In the London Bills from 1681 to 1684, the deaths from fever were many, with some from “spotted fever” nearly every week, while the annual mortalities from all causes were high. It is the more remarkable, therefore, that Sydenham should have discovered, in the beginning of 1685, the outbreak of a new fever, different from any that had prevailed for seven years before. The explanation seems to be that a malignant typhus fever, such as might have been discovered in any year in the crowded parishes where the working classes lived, broke out at the Court end of the town, where Sydenham’s practice lay.

The epidemic fever of 1685-86.

A letter of 12 March, 1685, says: “Sir R. Mason died this morning in his lodging at Whitehall. A fever rages that proves very mortal, and gives great apprehensions of a plague[32].” Sydenham also was reminded of the circumstances preceding the Great Plague of London in 1665. In his first account of the epidemic of fever in 1685[33], which began with a thaw in February, he points out that the thaw in March, 1665, had been followed by pestilential fever and thereafter by the plague proper. In a later reference, when the epidemic of fever was in its second year (1686) he says: “How long it may last I shall not guess; nor do I quite know whether it may not be a certain more spirituous, subtle beginning, and as if primordium, of the former depuratory fever (1661-64) which was followed by the most terrible plague. There are some phenomena which so far incline me to that belief[34].” However, no plague followed the malignant, if not pestilential, fever of 1685-86. The reign of plague, as the event showed, was over; the fever which had been on former occasions its portent and satellite, came into the place of reigning disease. It is true that Sydenham does not identify the fever of 1685-86 by name as pestilential fever; on[Pg 23] the contrary, he entitles his essay “De Novae Febris Ingressu.” But the novelty of type was partly in contrast to the fevers immediately preceding, which admitted treatment by bark, and its principal difference from the pestilential fever of former occasions seems to have been that it was not followed by plague[35]. Its antecedents and circumstances were very much those of plague itself. Its mortality was greatest in the old plague-seasons of summer and autumn, it had slight relation to famine or scarcity, or to other obvious cause of domestic typhus. Sydenham can find no explanation of the new constitution but “some secret and recondite change in the bowels of the earth pervading the whole atmosphere, or some influence of the celestial bodies.” He enlarges, however, on the character of the seasons preceding, which would have affected the surface, if not the bowels, of the earth, and the levels of the ground-water.

The winter of 1683-84 was one of intense frost; an ice-carnival was held on the Thames during the whole of January. The long dry frost of winter was followed by an excessively hot and dry summer, the drought being such as Evelyn did not remember, and as “no man in England had known.” For eight or nine months there had not been above one or two considerable showers, which came in storms. The winter of 1684-85 set in early, and became “a long and cruel frost,” more interrupted, however, than that of the year before. The spring was again dry, and it was not until the end of May 1685 that “we had plentiful rain after two years’ excessive drought and severe winters[36].”

The two years of excessive drought, with severe winters, had their effect upon the public health, as will appear from Short’s abstracts of parish registers in town and country[37]; the years 1683-85 being conspicuous for the excess of burials over baptisms:

[Pg 24]

Country Parishes.

There is no clue to the forms of sickness that caused the excessive mortality in country parishes and provincial towns. But in London it appears from the Bills that the one great cause of the unusual excess of deaths in 1684 was an enormous mortality from infantile diarrhoea, from the end of July to the middle of September, during the weather which Evelyn describes as excessively hot and dry with occasional storms of rain.

It was in the second year of the long drought, February, 1685, that Sydenham dated the beginning of his new febrile constitutions. The mortality of 1685 was just twenty deaths more than in 1684 (23,222); but fever (with spotted fever) and smallpox had each a thousand more out of the total than in the year before. Sydenham says that the fever did not spare children, which might be alleged of typhus at all times; but a fever of the kind, even if it ran through the children of a household, seldom cut off the very young, the mortality being in greatest part of adults and adolescents. Excepting smallpox for the year 1685, infantile and children’s maladies were not prominent during the constitution of the “new fever;” the usual items of high infantile mortality, such as convulsions and “griping in the guts” or infantile diarrhoea, were moderate and even low. Hence, although the weekly fever-deaths in the following Table may not appear sufficient for the professional and other interest that they excited, it is to be kept in mind that they had been mostly of adult lives. It is probable also that a good many of them had been among the well-to-do, and perhaps at first in the[Pg 25] West End; for there is nothing in the height of the weekly bills for all London to bear out the remark of the letter of 12 March, already quoted, “A fever rages that proves very mortal and gives apprehensions of a plague.”

Weekly Mortalities in London.

1685.

 [Pg 26]

Weekly Mortalities in London.

1686.

[Pg 27]Sydenham says that he regarded the new fever at first as nothing more than the “bastard peripneumony” which he had described for previous seasons; but he had soon cause to see that it wanted the violent cough, the racking pain in the head during coughing, the giddiness caused by the slightest movement, and the excessive dyspnoea of the latter (Huxham likewise distinguished typhus from “bastard peripneumony”). The early symptoms of the “new fever” were alternating chills and flushings, pain in the head and limbs, a cough, which might go off soon, with pain in the neck and throat. The fever was a continued one, with exacerbation towards evening; it was apt to change into a phrensy, with tranquil or muttering delirium; petechiae and livid blotches were brought out in some cases (Sydenham thought they were caused by cordials and a heating regimen), and there were occasional eruptions of miliary vesicles. The tongue might be moist and white at the edges for a time, latterly brown and dry. Clammy sweats were apt to break out, especially from the head. If the brain became the organ most touched, the fever-heat declined, the pulse became irregular, and jerking of the limbs came on before death.

Later writers, for example those who described the great epidemic fever of 1741, have identified the fever of 1685-86 with the contagious malignant fever afterwards called typhus, and Murchison, in his brief retrospect of typhus in Britain, has included it under that name. Sydenham mentions petechiae and livid blotches in some cases, and the Bills give a good many of the deaths in the worst weeks of the epidemic under the head of “spotted fever.” It is not at first easy to understand why Sydenham should have written an essay specially upon it, in September, 1686, to claim it as a new fever[38] and not rather as the old pestilential fever—“populares meos admonens de subingressu novae cujusdam Constitutionis, a qua pendet Febris nova species, a nuper grassantibus multum abludens.” It should be kept in mind that his motive was correct treatment,[Pg 28] and that the fashionable treatment of the day by Peruvian bark was, in his judgment, unsuited to this fever, however much it may have suited the epidemical intermittents of 1678-79 and the “depuratory” dregs of them for several years after. Physicians, he says, had learned to drive off by bark the fevers of the former constitution, from 1677 to the beginning of 1685, even when the fever intermitted little and sometimes when it intermitted not at all; and they saw an indication for bark in the nocturnal exacerbations of the new fever. Sydenham found that even large doses of bark did not free the patient from fever, and that restoration to health under treatment with the bark was due “magis fortunato alicui morbi eventu quam corticis viribus.” He seeks to establish the indications for another treatment by setting forth the symptoms minutely; and as the question of bark in fevers was the great medical question of the time, this may well have been Sydenham’s motive for discovering in the epidemic of 1685-6 a “new fever” although he does not say so in as many words. We have a good instance of how the bark-craze was at this time influencing the very highest circles of practice in the case of Lord Keeper Guildford, in July, 1685, as related in another chapter.

It will be seen from the table of weekly deaths that the second of the two hard winters was over before the fever began to attract notice. Sydenham compares its beginning after the thaw in February, 1685, to the beginning of the plague when the frost broke in March, 1665.

If it had been merely the typhus of a hard winter, of overcrowding indoors, of work and wages stopped by the frost, and of want of fuel (which things Evelyn mentions as matters of fact), it would have come sooner than the spring of 1685. The Bills for years before have regularly a good many deaths from fever, and always some from spotted fever; but these may have come from parishes wholly beyond the range of Sydenham’s practice. The fever began definitely for him in February, 1685, and was at its worst in the old plague-seasons of summer and autumn. If the seasons had any relation at all to it, the epidemic was a late effect of the long drought, an effect which was manifested most when the rain came, in the summer of 1685 and throughout the mild winter and normal summer of 1685-86. It must have been for that reason that Sydenham traced the source of it to “some secret and recondite change in the bowels[Pg 29] of the earth,” rather than to a change in the sensible qualities of the air. One must ever bear in mind that the physicians of the Restoration gave no thought to insanitary conditions of living; in that respect the later Stuart period seems to have been behind the Elizabethan or even the medieval; we cannot err in assuming, behind all Sydenham’s speculative causes, a great deal of unwholesomeness indoors. Sydenham’s fullest reference to the subterranean sources of poisonous miasmata occurs in his tractate on Gout:

It was Sydenham’s intimate friend Robert Boyle who worked out the hypothesis of subterraneous miasmata as a cause of epidemic (and endemic) diseases. An account of his theory will be found in the chapter on Influenzas and Epidemic Agues. It may be said here that it needs only a few changes, especially the substitution of organic for inorganic matters in the soil, to bring it into line with the modern doctrine of miasmatic infective disease as expounded by the Munich school.

It has not been usual to think of spotted fever, (or of influenzas), in that connexion; but a telluric source of the epidemic constitution of 1685-86 was clearly Sydenham’s view; and as the fever came in circumstances like those of the last great plague, and was thought at the time to be the forerunner of another great plague, its connexion with recondite decompositions in the soil, dependent on the phenomenal drought of two whole years before, cannot be set aside as a possibility, the less so that the fever, although of the type of typhus, was not a fever of cold, hunger, and domestic distress, but mainly of the warm, or mild, or soft weather following the long drought, and of many well-to-do-people, as in the great Netherlands fever of 1669.[Pg 30] My view of it is that it was the modified successor of plague, the pestis mitior, which used to precede and accompany the plague, now become the dominant constitution. The authentic figures of its mortality come from London; but Sydenham says that its “effects were felt far more in other places”; although Short’s abstracts of parish registers, given above, do not indicate excessive mortality throughout England.

Retrospect of the great Fever of 1623-25.

The most instructive instance of pestis mitior in Britain is not the pestilential fever which led up to the last plague (1665-6), but the great epidemic of fever all over England and Scotland which reigned for two or three years before the great outburst of plague in 1625. I go back to this because it was not wholly or even mainly a famine fever (although it was as general as one of the medieval famine-fevers), and because in that respect it furnishes a close parallel to the fever of 1685-86, which I regard as the successor of the plague. After this interlude in the history, we shall proceed to consider the question of the final extinction of plague.

The spotted fever or spotted ague of 1623-24, the plague of 1625, and the country agues of the same autumn make really a more instructive series of epidemic constitutions than any that fell under Sydenham’s observation, so instructive, indeed, that it has seemed worth while to revert to it for the sake of illustrating the doctrine of epidemics then in vogue. That doctrine made little of contagion from person to person; yet the idea of contagion was familiar, and had been so since medieval times. If we might assume contagion to explain such cases as those that occurred in the houses of squires and nobles, we might find a source of it either in the famine-fever of Scotland or in the war-fever of the Palatinate. But the teaching of the time was that it was in the air; and if the infective principle had been generated either in Scotland or on the upper Rhine it had diffused itself in some inscrutable way. The doctrine of epidemic constitutions seems strange to us; but some of the facts that it was meant to embrace are also strange to us. Were it not for an occasional reminder from influenza, we should hardly believe that any fevers could have travelled as the Hungarian fevers, the spotted fevers or “spotted agues” of former times are said to have done.

On the other hand, we have now a scientific doctrine of the effects of great fluctuations of the ground-water upon the production of telluric miasmata, which may be used to rationalize the theory of emanations adopted by Sydenham and Boyle. From this modern point of view the remarkable droughts preceding the pestilential fevers and plagues of 1624-25 and 1665, and preceding the fever of 1685-86, which is the one that immediately concerns us, may be not without significance.

The London fever of 1685-86 having been suspected at the time to be the forerunner of a plague, as other such fevers in[Pg 34] the earlier part of the century had been, and no plague having ensued, the question arises most naturally at this stage, why the plague should have never come back in London or elsewhere in Britain after the great outbreak of 1665-66.

The extinction of Plague in Britain.

Plague had been the grand infective disease of Britain from the year of the Black Death, 1348-9, for more than three centuries, down to 1666. The last of plague in Scotland was in 1647-8, in the west and north-west of England about 1650 (in Wales probably in 1636-8), in Ireland in 1650, and in all other parts of the kingdom including London in 1666, the absolute last of its provincial prevalence having been at Peterborough in the first months of 1667[53], while two or three occasional deaths continued to occur annually in London down to 1679. False reports of plague, contradicted by public advertisement, were circulated for Bath in 1675[54], and for Newcastle in 1710[55]; while in London as late as 1799, during a bad time of typhus fever, the occurrence of plague was alleged[56].

It is not easy to say why the plague should have died out. It had been continuous in England from 1348, at first in general epidemics, all over the country in certain years, thereafter mostly in the towns, either in great explosions at long intervals or at a moderate level for years together. The final outburst in 1665, which was one of the most severe in its whole history, had followed an unusually long period of freedom from plague in London, and was followed, as it were, by a still longer period of freedom until at last it could be said that the plague was extinct. In some large towns it had been extinct, as the event showed, at a much earlier date; thus at York the last known epidemic was in 1604, and it can hardly be doubted that many[Pg 35] other towns in England, Scotland and Ireland would have closed their records of plague earlier than they did had not the sieges and military occupations of the Civil Wars given especial occasion for the seeds of the infection to spring into life. Plague seemed to be dying out all over England and Scotland (in Ireland it is little heard of except in connexion with the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests) for some time before its final grand explosion in London in 1665.

In seeking for the causes of its decline and extinction we must keep prominently in view the fact that the virus was brought into the country from abroad as the Black Death of 1348-9. But for that importation it is conceivable that there would have been no signal history of plague in Britain. Its original prevalence was on a great scale, and there were several other widespread epidemics throughout the rest of the 14th century. In the first volume of this history I have collected evidence that plague was endemic or steady for long periods of the 15th and 16th centuries in London, with greater outbursts at intervals, and that in the 17th century it came chiefly in great explosions. Something must have served to keep the virus in the country, and more especially in the towns, until at length it was exhausted. An exotic infection, or one that had not arisen from indigenous conditions, and would probably never have so arisen, does not remain indefinitely in the country to which it is imported. Thus Asiatic cholera, imported into Europe on six, or perhaps five, occasions in the 19th century, has never become domesticated; and yellow fever had a career in the southern provinces of Spain during some twenty years only. Plague did become domesticated for about three centuries in England, and for longer in some other countries of Europe; but it died out at length, and it would almost certainly have died out sooner had it not found in all European countries some conditions not altogether unsuited to it. What were the favouring conditions?

If, as I believe, the virus of plague had its habitat in the soil, from which it rose in emanations, and if it depended therein, both remotely for its origin in some distant country, as well as immediately for its continuance in all countries, upon the decomposition of human bodies, then it is easy to understand that the immense mortalities caused by each epidemic would preserve the seeds of the disease, or the crude matters of the disease, in the soil. Buried plague-bodies would be the most obvious[Pg 36] sources of future plagues. But if the theory given of the Black Death be correct, bodies dead of famine or famine-fever would also favour in an especial way the continuance of the plague-virus in certain spots of ground, although they would probably never have originated it in this country. Moreover, the products of ordinary cadaveric decomposition would be so much pabulum or nutriment for the continuance of the virus. But all those things being constant, the continuance of plague would largely depend upon the manner in which the dead, after plague, or after famine and fever, or in general, were disposed of. The soil of all England in 1348-9 was filled with multitudes of the dead laid in trenches, and there were several general revivals of plague in the fifty or sixty years following. In London there were plague-pits opened in the suburbs in many great epidemics during three centuries. Even when there was no epidemic the dead were laid in the ground in such a manner that their resolution was speedy, and the diffusion of the products unchecked. But it is undoubted that greater care in the disposal of the dead did at length come into vogue. Thus, in the Black Book of the Corporation of Tewkesbury there is an entry under the year 1603, that all those dead of plague, “to avoid the perill, were buried in coffins of bourde,” the disease having carried off no fewer than 560 the year before (1602) and being then in its second season.[57]. The reason given is “to avoid the peril,” and it is beyond question that burial in a coffin did in fact delay decomposition (unless in peculiar circumstances which need not be particularized), and kept the cadaveric products from passing quickly and freely into the pores of the ground. Again, if the burial were in such coffins as the Chinese commonly use, the decomposition would proceed almost as slowly as if the body had been embalmed, and with as little risk of befouling the soil. For a long time in England such burials were the privilege only of the rich; but as wealth increased by commerce they became the privilege of all classes; and in the last great plague of London, as I said in my former volume, “even at the worst time coffins would seem to have been got for most.” Defoe’s account of the burials in heaps in plague-pits is so exactly like that of Dekker for the plague of 1603, and of other contemporaries for the plague of 1625, that one may reasonably suspect him to have used these earlier accounts as his authority for the practice[Pg 37] in 1665, which he had no direct knowledge of. However, I do not contend that there were no such burials in 1665; just as one learns from Dekker that the coffin-makers in 1603 were busily employed and grew rich, although he also describes how a husband “saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he hated” launched into the pit “within a pair of sheets.” In ordinary times, as we learn from the tables of burial-dues, there were poorer interments without coffins as late as 1628, according to a document printed by Spelman, the name of the parish being withheld, and even as late as 1672 in the parish of St Giles’s, Cripplegate. Spelman’s object in writing in 1641 was to protest against the mercenary practices of the clergy in the matter of burial, recalling the numerous canons of the medieval Church directed against all such forms of simony; and incidentally he mentions that it was testified before the Commissioners that a certain parson “had made forty pound of one grave in ten yeeres, by ten pounds at a time”[58]—a “tenancy of the soil” short enough to satisfy even the so-called Church of England Burial Reform Association. The use of coffins in the burial of the very poorest is now so universal that we hardly realize how gradually it was introduced. I am unable to say when burial in a sheet or cerecloth ceased; but it became less and less the rule for the poorer classes throughout the 17th century. In 1666 was passed the Act for burial in woollen, which was re-enacted more strictly in 1678[59]. The motive of it was to encourage the native woollen manufactures, or to prevent the money of the country from being expended on foreign-made linen; and its clauses ordained that woollen should be substituted for linen in the lining of the coffin and in the shrouding of the corpse, but that no penalty should be exacted for burying in linen any that shall die of the plague. Whether it prohibited in effect the use of linen cerecloths to enshroud corpses where no coffin was used does not appear clearly from the terms of the Act; but, as the intention was to discourage the use of linen, and to bring in the use of woollen, for all purposes of burial, it is probable that it served to put an end to coffinless burials altogether, wherever it was[Pg 38] enforced, inasmuch as the prescribed material was wholly unsuited for the purpose of a cerecloth.

The history of the London plague-pit between Soho and the present Regent Street shows that, after the last great plague of 1665-66, more caution was used against infection from the buried plague-bodies. Macaulay says it was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life; and he asserts that no foundations were laid in the pest-field till two generations had passed and till the spot had long been surrounded with buildings, the space being left blank in maps of London as late as the end of George I.’s reign[60].

After 1666 the old churchyards were not less crowded than before, but more crowded, perhaps because coffined corpses occupied more space and decayed more slowly. On 17 October, 1672, Evelyn paid a visit to Norwich: “I observed that most of the churchyards (tho’ some of them large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodys one upon another, for want of earth, even to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so as the churches seemed to be built in pitts.” The same day he had visited Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the famous essay on urn burial or cremation, (suggested to him by the digging up of forty or fifty funeral urns in a field at Old Walsingham). The essay is full of curious learning and equally curious moralizing. But Sir Thomas, though a physician, has not a word to say on so proximate a topic as the state of the Norwich churchyards, which came under his eyes and perhaps under his nose every day of his life[61].

The practice of burying in coffins, which came at length within the means of all classes, may seem too paltry a cause to assign, even in part, for so remarkable an effect as the absolute disappearance of plague after a duration of more than three[Pg 39] centuries. My view of the matter is that the virus would have died out of itself had it not been continually augmented, or fed by its appropriate pabulum, and that the gradual change in the mode of interment helped to check such augmentation or feeding.

But the more elaborate interment of the dead was itself an index of the greater spending power of the community, and it may be said that it was the better condition of the people, and not this one particular thing in it, which put an end to the periodical recurrences of plague. In all but its earliest outbursts in the fourteenth, and perhaps the fifteenth century, plague had been peculiarly an infection of the poor, being known as “the poor’s plague.” Perhaps the chief reason why the richer classes usually escaped it was that they fled from the plague-tainted place, leaving the poorer classes unable to stir from their homes, exposed to the infectious air, and all the more exposed that their habitual employments and wages would cease, their sustenance become precarious, their condition lowered, and their manners reckless. Again, it was not unusual for the plague to break out in a season of famine or scarcity, during which the ordinary risks of the labouring class would be aggravated. Famines ceased (except in Ireland, where there had been comparatively little plague), and scarcities became less common. The sieges and occupations of the Civil Wars in the middle of the 17th century, which undoubtedly were the occasion of the last outbursts of plague in many of the towns, were a brief experience, followed by unbroken tranquillity. Whatever things were tending to the removal of plague in all its old seats had free course thereafter.

On the other hand, one may make too much of the increase of well-being among the labouring class which coincided with the cessation of plague. As a check upon population plague worked in a very remarkable way. In London, as well as in towns like Newcastle and Chester, plague towards the end of its reign arose perhaps once in a generation and made a clean sweep of a fifth or a fourth part of the inhabitants, including hardly any of the well-to-do. It destroyed, of course, many bread-winners and many that were not absolutely sunk in poverty; but its broad effect was to cut off the margin of poverty as if by a periodical process of pruning. The Lord Mayor of London wrote to the Privy Council at the end of the great plague of 1625: “The great mortality, although it had[Pg 40] taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen”—a decay of trade which they might reasonably expect to recover from before long. No such ruthless shears was ever applied at intervals to the growing fringe of poverty in after times. The poor were a more permanent residue, pressing more upon each other; but they did not press more upon the rich, except through the poor rate; on the contrary, the separation of classes became more marked.

Perhaps I ought to give an illustration of this, so as not to leave so radical a change in the vague and disputable form of a generality. I shall take the instance of Chester; its circuit of walls, remaining from the Roman conquest, is something fixed for the imagination to rest upon amidst changes within and without them.

[Pg 42]The case of Chester shows by broader contrasts than anywhere else the change from the public health of plague-times to that of more modern times. But it can hardly be said to show the populace better off than before; it shows them changed into a proletariat, and separated from the richer classes by walls several feet thick. Such, at least, was the result after four generations of immunity from plague, a result which indicates, as I have said, that we may easily make too much of the improved well-being of the poorer classes as a cause of the cessation of plague.

An easy explanation of plague ceasing in London has long been current, and just because it is an easy explanation it will probably hold the field for many years to come. It is that the fire of 1666 burnt out the seeds of plague. Defoe, writing in 1723, ascribed this opinion to certain “quacking philosophers,” but he would hardly have said so if he could have foreseen the respectable authority for it in after times. The plague had ceased in most of its provincial centres after the Civil Wars, and in some of them, such as York, from as early a date as 1604. It ceased in all the principal cities of Western Europe within a few years of its cessation in London. In London itself it ceased after 1666, not only in the City which was the part burned down in September of that year, but in St Giles’s, where the Great Plague began, in Cripplegate, Whitechapel and Stepney, where it was always worst, in Southwark, Bermondsey and Newington, in Lambeth and Westminster. Nor can it be said that the City was the source from which the infection used to spread to the Liberties and out-parishes. All the later plagues of London, perhaps even that of 1563, began in the Liberties or out-parishes and at length invaded the City. The part of London that was rebuilt after 1666 contained many finer dwelling-houses than before, built of stone, with substantial carpentry, and elegantly finished in fine and rare woods. The fronts of the new houses did not overhang so as to obstruct the ventilation of the streets and lanes; but the streets, lanes, alleys and courts were somewhat closely reproduced on the old foundations. A side walk in some streets was secured for foot-passengers by means of massive posts, which, with the projecting signs of houses and shops, were at length removed in 1766. The improvements in the City after the fire were mostly in the houses of the richer[Pg 43] citizens. The City was the place of residence of the rich, with perhaps as many poorer purlieus in close proximity as the residential districts of London now have. But four-fifths of London at the time of the fire were beyond the walls of the City. It is in these extramural regions that the interest mostly lies for epidemical diseases. They remain, says Defoe in 1723, “still in the same condition they were in before.” Unfortunately we know little of their condition, whether in the 17th century or in the 18th. But there must have been something in it most unfavourable to health; for we find from the Bills of Mortality that the cessation of plague made hardly any difference to the annual average of deaths, the increase of population being allowed for. This fact makes the disappearance of plague all the more remarkable.

Fevers to the end of the 17th century.

The epidemical seasons of 1685-86 were the last that Sydenham recorded; he was shortly after laid aside from active work by gout, and died in 1689. Morton, who made notes of fevers and smallpox until 1694, is more a clinical observer than a student of “epidemic constitutions”; and although his writings are of value to the epidemiologist, he does not help us to understand the circumstances in which epidemic diseases prevailed more at one time than another. To the end of the century there is no other medical source of information, and little besides generalities to be collected from any source. It is known that the years from 1693 to 1699 were years of scarcity all over the kingdom, that the fever-deaths in London reached the high figure of 5036 in 1694, and that there was a high mortality in many country parishes and market towns during the scarcity. But there are few particular illustrations of the type of epidemic sickness. There is, therefore, little left to do but to give the figures, and to add some remarks.

Fever Deaths in the London Bills, 1687-1700.

 [Pg 44]

Tables from Short’s Abstracts of Parish Registers.

In the London figures the year 1694 stands out conspicuous by its deaths from all causes, and by its high total of fevers. The fever-deaths began to rise from their steady weekly level a little before Christmas, 1693, and remained high all through the year 1694, with a good many deaths from “spotted fever” in the worst weeks. Among the victims in London in February was Sir William Phipps, Governor of New England: his illness appeared at first to be a cold, which obliged him to keep his chamber; but it proved “a sort of malignant fever, whereof many about this time died in the city[65].” Pepys, writing to Evelyn on 10 August, 1694, calls it “the fever of the season,” three being down with it at his house, but well advanced in their recovery. In that week and in the week following, the deaths in London from all causes touched the highest points of the year, the deaths from fever and spotted fever being a full quarter of them. Fever at its worst in London never made more than a quarter of the annual deaths from all causes; so that, if[Pg 45] we take it to have been the successor of the plague, it operated in a very different way—with a greatly lessened fatality of all that were attacked, with only a reminder of the old special incidence upon the summer and autumn seasons, but with a steadiness from year to year, and throughout each year, that made the fever-deaths of a generation little short of one of those enormous totals of plague-deaths that were rapidly piled up during a few months, perhaps once or twice in a generation.

The following table from the London weekly Bills shows the progress of the fever from the end of April, 1694, with the number of deaths specially assigned to “spotted fever”:—

London: Weekly Mortalities from fever and all causes, epidemic of 1694.

The year 1694, to which the epidemic of malignant fever (as well as malignant smallpox) belongs, was one of the series of “seven ill years” at the end of the 17th century (1693-99). They were long noted, says Thorold Rogers, “for the distress of the people and for the exalted profits of the farmer.” The price of wheat in the autumn and winter of 1693 was the highest since the famine of 1661. In 1697-8 corn was again dear and much of it was spoilt. At Norwich in 1698 wheat was sold at 44s. a comb.

Harvests spoiled by wet weather or unseasonable cold appear to have been the most general cause of the high prices of food. In London there was no unusual sickness except in 1694; indeed the other years to the end of the century show a somewhat low[Pg 46] mortality, the year 1696, which Macaulay marks as a time of severe distress among the common people owing to the calling in of the debased coinage[66], had the smallest number of deaths from all causes (18,638) since many years before, and for a century after allowing for the increase of population. But the deaths from “fever” were some three thousand every year, and the births, so far as registered, were, as usual, far below the deaths.

It was in the country at large that the effects of the “seven ill years” were chiefly felt. According to Short’s abstracts of parish registers, there was unusual mortality at the beginning of the period and at the end of it; in his Chronology he mentions spotted fever, bloody flux and agues in 1693 (besides an influenza or universal slight fever recorded by Molyneux of Dublin), and again in 1697 and 1698 “purples, quinsies, Hungarian and spotted fever, universal pestilential spotted fever,” from famine and bad food.

When we look for the evidence of this in England we shall have difficulty in finding it. Short’s own abstracts give almost no colour to it; but there are other figures from the parish registers, scattered through the county histories and statistical works, which prove that the seven ill years must have checked population. Thus at Sheffield in the ten years 1691-1700 there was the greatest excess of burials over baptisms in the whole history of the town from 1561—namely, 2856 burials to 2221 baptisms (688 marriages). At Minehead, Somerset, a parish of some 1200 people occupied in weaving, the deaths and births were as follows in four years of the decennium:

A glimpse of spotted or pestilential fever in Bristol during the years of distress at the end of the 17th century comes from Dr Dover, a man of no academical repute, but at all events an articulate voice. Passing from an account of the spotted pestilential fever at Guayaquil, “when I took it by storm,” he goes on[67]:

—an experience of typhus in children which was strictly according to rule. This had clearly been the occasion of a memorial addressed to the Mayor and Aldermen of Bristol, in 1696, praying that a capacious workhouse should be erected for children and the aged, which “will prevent children from being smothered or starved by the neglect of the parish officers and poverty of their parents, which is now a great loss to the nation[68].”

The year 1698 was the climax of the seven ill years. The spring was the most backward for forty-seven years, the first wheat in the ear being seen near London on 16th June. For four months to the end of August the days were almost all rainy, except from the 18th to the 26th July. Whole fields of corn were spoilt. In Kent there was barley standing uncut on 29th September, and some lay in the swathe until December. Much of the corn in the north of England was not got in until Christmas, and in Scotland they were reaping the green empty corn in January[69].

Fevers of the seven ill years in Scotland.

It is from Scotland that we hear most of the effects of the seven ill years in the way of famine and fever. Scotland was then in a backward state compared with England; and its northern climate, making the harvest always a few weeks later than in England, told especially against it in the ill years. Fynes Morryson, in the beginning of the 17th century, contrasts the Scotch manner of life unfavourably with the English, and Sir Robert Sibbald’s account towards the end of that century is little better. Morryson says, “the excesse of drinking was then farre greater in generall among the Scots than the English.” Sibbald remarks[70] on the drinking habits of the Scots common[Pg 48] people: their potations of ale or spirits on an empty stomach, especially in the morning, relaxed the fibres and induced “erratic fevers of a bad type, bastard pleurisies, ... dropsies, stupors, lethargies and apoplexies.” Morryson says: “Their bedsteads were then like cubbards in the wall, with doores to be opened and shut at pleasure, so as we climbed up to our beds. They used but one sheete, open at the sides and top, but close at the feete, and so doubled[71].” Sibbald says the peasantry had poor food and hard work, and were subject to many diseases—“heartburn, sleeplessness, ravings, hypochondriac affections, mania, dysentery, scrophula, cancer, and a dire troop of diseases which everywhere now invades the husbandmen that were formerly free from diseases.” Causa a victu est. Therefore consumption was common enough. He has much to say of fevers,—of intermittents, especially in spring and autumn, catarrhal fevers, nervous fevers, comatose fevers, with delirium, spasms and the like symptoms, malignant, spotted, pestilential, hectic, &c. The continued fevers ranged in duration from fifteen to thirty-one days, recovery being ushered in with sweats, alvine flux and salivation. Purple fevers had sometimes livid or black spots mixed with the purple (mottling); in a case given, there were suppurations which appear to have been bubonic. There had been no plague in Scotland since 1647-48; but fevers, unless Sibbald has given undue prominence to them, would appear to have filled its place among the adults.

Another writer of this period, from whom some information is got as to fevers, was Dr Andrew Brown of Edinburgh. He is mainly a controversialist, and is on the whole of little use save for the history of the treatment of fevers. He came to London on a visit in 1687, attracted by the fame of Sydenham’s method of curing fevers by antimonial emetics and by purgation: “Returning home as much overjoyed as I had gotten a treasure, I presently set myself to that practice”—of which he gave an account in his ‘Vindicatory Schedule concerning the New Cure of Fever[72].’ Continual fever, he says, takes up, with its pendicles, the half of all the diseases that men are afflicted with; and some part of what he calls continual fever must have been spotted: “As concerning the eruption of spots in fevers, these altogether resemble the marks made by stroaks on the skin, and these[Pg 49] marks are also made by the stagnation and coagulation of the blood in the small channels [according to the doctrine of obstructions].... They tinge the skin with blewness or redness.”

The bitter controversy as to the treatment of fevers led Brown into another writing in 1699[73].

This account of the experience which Dr Andrew Brown had lately had among his children and domestics in or near Edinburgh was written in 1699, and may be taken as relating to part of the wide-spread sickliness of the seven ill years in Scotland. Fletcher of Saltoun gives us a general view of the deplorable state of Scotland at the end of the 17th century, which was intensified by the succession of bad harvests[75]. The rents of cultivated farms were paid, not in money, but in corn, which gave occasion to many inequalities, to the traditional fraudulent practices of millers and to usury. The pasture lands for sheep and black cattle had no shelters from the weather, and no winter provision of hay or straw (roots were unheard of until long after), “so that the beasts are in a dying condition.” The country swarmed with vagrants (a hundred thousand, he estimates, in ordinary times, but doubled in the dear years), who lived and multiplied in incest, rioted in swarms in the nearest hills in times of plenty, and in times of distress fell upon farmhouses in gangs[Pg 50] of forty or more, demanding food. Besides these there were a great many poor families very meanly provided for by the Church boxes, who lived wholly upon bad food and fell into various diseases. He had been credibly informed that some families in the years of mere scarcity preceding the climax of 1698-99 had eaten grains, for want of bread. “In the worst time, from unwholesome food diseases are so multiplied among poor people that, if some course be not taken, the famine may very probably be followed by a plague[76].”

We owe some details of these calamities in Scotland to Patrick Walker, the Covenanter, who records them to show how the prophecies of Divine vengeance on the land, uttered during the Stuart persecutions by Cargill and Peden, had been in due time fulfilled[77]:

[Pg 52]We may take it that these experiences in the reign of William III. were peculiar to Scotland; even Ireland, which had troubles enough of the same kind in the 18th and 19th centuries, was at that time resorted to as a place of refuge by the distressed Scots. Among the special and temporary causes in Scotland were antiquated agricultural usage, an almost incredible proportion of the people in a state of lawless vagrancy, such as Henry VIII. and Elizabeth had to deal with a century and a half before, a low state of morals, both commercial and private, a tyrannical disposition of the employers, a sullen attitude of the labourers, and a total decay of the spirit of charity. An ancient elder of the parish of Fordyce, who kept some traditions of the dear years, remarked to the minister: “If the same precautions had been taken at that time which he had seen taken more lately in times of scarcity, the famine would not have done so much hurt, nor would so many have perished.”

The evil of vagrancy, for which Fletcher of Saltoun saw no remedy but a state of slavery not unlike that which Protector Somerset had actually made the law of England for a couple of years, 1547-49, in somewhat similar circumstances, gradually cured itself without a resort to the practices of antiquity or of barbarism.

The union with England in 1707, by removing the customs duties and opening the Colonial trade to Scots shipping (they had a share in the East India trade already) gave a remarkable impulse to the manufacture of linen and to commerce. Such was the demand for Scots linen that, it seemed to De Foe, “the poor could want no employment”; and it may certainly be taken as a fact that the establishment on a free basis of industries and foreign markets gave Scotland relief from the pauperism and vagrancy, like those of Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries, that threatened for a time, and especially in the Seven Ill Years, to retard the developement of the nation.

For several years after the period of scarcity or famine from 1693 to 1699, the history of fever in Britain presents little for special remark.

A book of the time was Dr George Cheyne’s New Theory of Continual Fever, London, 1701. His theory is that of Bellini and Borelli, which accounted for everything in fevers on[Pg 53] mechanical principles, and ignored the infective element in them. Cheyne does not even describe what the fevers were; but in showing how the theory applies, he mentions incidentally the symptoms—quick pulse, pain in the head, burning heat, want of sleep, raving, clear or flame-coloured urine, and morbid strength. Equally theoretical is the handling of the subject by Pitcairn. Freind, in his essays on fevers[82], is mainly occupied with controversial matters of treatment, except in connexion with Lord Peterborough’s expedition to Spain in 1705, as we shall see in a section on sickness of camps and fleets.

In the absence of clinical details from the medical profession, the following from letters of the time will serve a purpose:

On 18 September, 1700, Thomas Bennett writes to Thomas Coke from Paris giving an account of the fever of Coke’s brother: His fever is very violent upon him, and he has a hickup and twitchings in his face; he is especially ill in the night, and has now and then violent sweats. He raved for eight days together and in all that time did not get an hour’s sleep. He was attended by Dr Helvetius and other physicians. Lady Eastes, her son, and most of her servants are sick, but they are all on the mending hand; her steward is dead of a high fever, having been sick but five days[83]. These are Paris fevers, the symptoms suggesting typhus, especially the prolonged vigil in one of the cases. It is to be remarked that they occurred among the upper classes; and it appears that the universal fevers “of a bad type” in France in 1712 did not spare noble houses nor even the palace of Louis the Great[84].

The following from the London Bills will show the prevalence of fever from year to year[85].

[Pg 54]

The London fever of 1709-10.

The “seven ill years” were followed by the fine summer and abundant harvest (although hardly more than half the breadth was sown) of 1699. Scarcity was not a cause of excessive sickness again until 1709-10; although the harvest of 1703 was unfavourable. The price of wheat in 1702 was 25s. 6d. per quarter, and continued low for a number of years, notwithstanding the war with France. In Marlborough’s wars there were no war-prices for farmers, as in the corresponding circumstances a century after; on the contrary, corn and produce of all kinds were so cheap that farmers had difficulty in paying their rents. The bounty of five shillings per quarter on exported wheat had given a great impulse to corn-growing, so that the acreage of wheat sown was much more than the country in an ordinary year required, partly, no doubt, because the bread of the poorer classes was largely made from the coarser cereals. The period of abundance was broken by the excessively severe winter of 1708-9, one of three memorable winters in the 18th century. The frost lasted all over Europe from October to March, and was followed by a greatly deficient crop in 1709. The following shows the rise of the price of the quarter of wheat in England:

[Pg 55]

The export of corn was prohibited in 1709 and again in 1710.

An epidemic of fever began in London in the autumn of 1709 and continued throughout 1710, in which year the fever-deaths reached the highest total since 1694. But it was not altogether a fever of starvation or distress among the poor, and perhaps not mainly so. There is always the dual question in connexion with fever following bad seasons and high prices: how much of it was due to the scarcity, and how much to those states of soil and atmosphere upon which the failure of the crop itself depended. An authentic case of the malignant fever which began to rage in London in the autumn of 1709 will both serve to show the remarkable type of at least a portion, if not the whole of the epidemic, and to prove its incidence upon the houses of the rich.

[Pg 56]The tremors, offensive sweats and offensive breath are distinctive of a form of typhus that became common towards the middle of the century, and was called putrid fever (not in the sense of Willis) or miliary fever from the watery vesicles of the skin that often attended it. But although Hamilton was writing on miliary fever (of the factitious variety) this case is not given as an example, but is appended to his sixteen cases of the latter, as an example of “a deadly fever with loss of speech from the beginning.” Among earlier cases, those belonging to the epidemic of 1661 as described by Willis correspond closely with this case, which we may take as representing part of the malignant fever that then raged in London. We have an anatomical record from each; but in neither was there sloughing of the lymph-follicles of the intestine, or of the mesenteric glands, as in the enteric fever of our own time; while in both there were red or purple spots on the breast or neck, and on the limbs. The “loss of speech from the beginning” suggests Sydenham’s “absolute aphonia” in the comatose fever of 1673-76, which resembled in other respects Willis’s fever of the brain and nervous stock (mostly of children) in 1661. One of the synonyms of “infantile remittent” was “an acute fever with dumbness[87].” This seems to have been a common type of fever in the latter part of the 17th century and early part of the 18th. Some likeness to enteric fever may be found in it, but there is no warrant for identifying it with that fever. Its main features may be said to have been its incidence upon the earlier years of life, but not to the exclusion of adult cases, its remarkable ataxic symptoms, which led Willis to refer it to “the brain and nervous stock” (spinal cord), its comatose character, its spots, occasional miliary eruption, ill-smelling sweats and other foetid evacuations, its protracted course, and its hectic sequelae.

The weekly bills of mortality in London bear little evidence of unusual prevalence of fever in 1709, except in the weeks ending 13 and 20 September, when the fever-deaths were 96 and 75 (including “spotted fever”). But the unusual entry of “malignant fever” appears in three weekly bills, 19 July, 9 August and 23 August, one death being referred to it on each occasion. It was in the summer and autumn of 1710 that the fever reached a height in London, being attended with a very[Pg 57] fatal smallpox. An essay on the London epidemic of 1710[88] is interesting chiefly for recording a probable case of relapsing fever, a form which was almost certainly part of the great febrile epidemic in London in 1727-29.

The following table shows the very high mortality from fever (as well as from smallpox) in the epidemic to which the above case belonged.

London: Weekly deaths from fever, smallpox and all causes.

1710.

[Pg 58]Throughout England, in country parishes and in towns, the first ten years of the 18th century were on the whole a period of good public health. In Short’s abstracts of the parish registers to show the excess of deaths over the births, those years are as little conspicuous as any in the long series. It was a time when there was a great lull in smallpox, and probably also in fevers. The figures for Sheffield may serve as an example[90]. It will be seen from the Table that the burials exceeded the baptisms in every decade from the Restoration to the end of the century; after that for twenty years the baptisms exceeded the burials, the marriages having increased greatly.

Vital Statistics of Sheffield.

Of particular epidemics, we hear of a malignant fever at Harwich in 1709. Harwich was then an important naval station, and the fever may have arisen in connexion with the transport of troops to and from the seat of war, just as camp- and war-fevers appeared at various ports in the next war, 1742-48.

There were rumours of a plague at Newcastle in 1710, which were contradicted by advertisement in the London Gazette[91]. But, as there was so much plague in the Baltic ports in 1710 it is possible that the Newcastle rumour may have been one of plague imported, and not a rumour suggested by the mortality from some other disease.

[Pg 59]To the same period of epidemic fever in London, about 1709-10, belongs also a curiously localized epidemic in an Oxford college, which reminds one somewhat of the circumstances of enteric fever in our time. It was told to Dr Rogers of Cork twenty-five or twenty-six years before the date of his writing (1734), by one who was a student at Oxford then: “There broke out amongst the scholars of Wadham College a fever very malignant, that swept away great numbers, whilst the rest of the colleges remained unvisited. All agreed that the contagious infection arose from the putrefaction of a vast quantity of cabbages thrown into a heap out of the several gardens near Wadham College[92].”

The next epidemic of fever in London was in 1714. Like that of 1710, it followed a great rise in the price of wheat, or perhaps it followed the unseasonable weather which caused the deficient harvest. Before the Peace of Utrecht wheat in England was as low as 33s. 9d. per quarter, in 1712, the peace next year sending it no lower than 30s. But at Michaelmas, 1713, it rose with a bound to 56s. 11d., doubtless owing to a bad harvest. The fever-deaths in London began to rise in the spring of 1714, reaching a weekly total of 103 in the week ending 20 April. All through the summer and autumn they continued very high, the weekly totals exceeding, on an average, those of the year 1710, as in the foregoing table, and having corresponding large additions of “spotted fever.” The deaths from all causes in 1714 were a quarter more than those of the year before, the epidemic of fever being the chief contributor to the rise. This happened to be a very slack time in medical writing[93]; but, even in the absence of such testimony as we have for earlier and later epidemics of fever in London, we may safely conclude that the fever of 1714 was of the type of pestilential or malignant typhus, beginning in early summer and reaching a height in the old plague season of autumn.

A singular instance of what may be considered war-typhus[Pg 60] belongs to the winter of 1715-16. The political intrigues preceding and following the death of Queen Anne in 1714 culminated in the Jacobite rising in Scotland and the North of England in 1715. The Jacobites having been defeated at Preston on 13 November, prisoners to the number of 450 were brought to Chester Castle on the Sunday night before December 1st. A fortnight later (December 15th), Lady Otway writes of the 450 prisoners in the Castle:

Prosperity of Britain, 1715-65.

The fifty years from 1715 to 1765 were, with two or three exceptions, marked by abundant harvests, low prices and heavy exports of corn. This was undoubtedly a great time in the expansion of England, a time of fortune-making for the monied class, and of cheapness of the necessaries of life.

The well-being and comfort of the middle class were undoubtedly great; also there was something peculiar to England in the prosperity of towns and villages throughout all classes. In the very worst year of the period, the year 1741, Horace Walpole landed at Dover on the 13th September, having completed the grand tour of Europe. Like many others, he was delighted with the pleasant county of Kent as he posted towards London; and on stopping for the night at Sittingbourne, he wrote as follows in a letter:

[Pg 61]Our history henceforth has little to record of malignant typhus fevers, or of smallpox, in these snug houses of the middle class, although not only the middle class, but also the highest class had a considerable share of those troubles all through the 17th century. But the 18th century, even the most prosperous part of it, from the accession of George I. to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the last quarter or third of it, was none the less a most unwholesome period in the history of England. The health of London was never worse than in those years, and the vital statistics of some other towns, such as Norwich, are little more satisfactory. This was the time which gave us the saying, that God made the country and man made the town. Praise of rural felicity was a common theme in the poetry of the time, as in Johnson’s London:

“There every bush with nature’s music rings,
There every breeze bears health upon its wings.”

Both for the country and the town the history of the public health does not harmonize well with the optimist views of the 18th century. The historians are agreed that, under the two first Georges, during the ministries of Walpole, the Pelhams and Pitt, the prosperity of Britain was general. Adam Smith speaks of “the peculiarly happy circumstances of the country” during the reign of George II. (1727-60). Hallam characterizes the same reign as “the most prosperous that England had ever experienced.” The most recent historian of England in the 18th century is of the same opinion[96]. The novels of Fielding give us the concrete picture of the period with epic fidelity, and the picture is of abundance and prodigality. Agriculture and commerce with the Colonies, India and the continent of Europe, were the sources of the country’s wealth. Farming and stock-raising had been greatly improved by the introduction of roots and sown grasses.[Pg 62] In some country parishes the baptisms were three times the burials. But the public health during this period will not appear in a favourable light from what follows. More particularly there were three occasions, about the years 1718, 1728 and 1741, when a single bad harvest in the midst of many abundant ones brought wide-spread distress, with epidemics of typhus and relapsing fever; from which fact it would appear that the common people had little in hand. Thorold Rogers, among economists, was of the opinion that the prosperity was all on the side of the governing and capitalist classes, that the labourers were in “irremediable poverty” and “without hope,” and that the law of parochial settlement, with the artificial fixing of wages by the Quarter Sessions and the bonuses out of the poor-rates, had the effect of keeping the mass of the people on the land “in a condition wherein existence could just be maintained[97].” I shall not attempt an independent judgment in economics, but proceed to those illustrations of national well-being which belong to my subject, leaving the latter to have their due weight on the one side of economical opinion or on the other. Besides the economical question there is of course also an ethical one. When the pinch came about 1766, there was the usual diversity of opinion expressed on the “condition of England” problem, one holding that the labourers were unfairly paid, another that the nation had been made “splendid and flourishing by keeping wages low,” and that the distress was due to “want of industry, want of frugality, want of sobriety, want of principle” among the common people at large. “If in a time of plenty,” wrote one austere moralist, “the labourers would abate of their drunkenness, sloth, and bad economy, and make a reserve against times of scarcity, they would have no reason to complain of want or distress at any time[98].” But there must have been something wrong in the economics and morals of their betters if it were the case that the working class as a whole, and not merely a certain number of individuals in it, was drunken, thriftless and slothful. The familiar proof of this is the apathy of the Church, broken by the Methodist revival of religion.

 [Pg 63]

The epidemic fevers of 1718-19.

In the fifty years from 1715 to 1765, the three worst periods of epidemic fever in England and Scotland correspond closely to the three periods of actual famine and its attendant train of sicknesses in Ireland, namely, the years 1718-19, 1727-29, and 1740-42. The three divisions of the kingdom suffered in common, Ireland suffering most. The first period, 1718-19, was an extremely slack tide in medical writing, insomuch that hardly any accounts of the reigning maladies remain, except those by Wintringham, of York, and Rogers, of Cork. The whole of the Irish history of fevers and the allied maladies is dealt with in a chapter apart. Of the Scots history, little is known for the first of the three periods beyond a statement that there was a malignant fever and dysentery in Lorn, Argyllshire, in January and February, 1717[99].

Wintringham gives the following account of the synochus, afterwards called typhus, which attracted notice in the summer of 1718 and became more common in the warm season of 1719: in each year it began about May, reached its height in July and lasted all August, carrying off many of those who fell into it.

This applies to the city of York, but in what special circumstances we are not told. However, it happens that a physician of York, two generations after, in giving an account of the great improvement that had taken place in its public health, throws some light on its old-world state: “The streets[Pg 64] have been widened in many places by taking down a number of old houses built in such a manner as almost to meet in the upper stories, by which the sun and air were almost excluded in the streets and inferior apartments[101].”

In London the fever-deaths, with the deaths from all causes, rose decidedly in 1718, and reached a very high figure in 1719, of which the summer was excessively hot. One cause, at least, was want of employment, especially among weavers in the East End[102]. But the epidemic fever of 1718-19 was not limited to the distressed classes; we have a glimpse of it, under the name of “spotted fever,” in the family of the archbishop of Canterbury:

“On Friday night the archbishop of Canterbury’s sixth daughter was interred in our chancel, with four others preceding, she dying on Monday after three days of the spotted fever. The fourth and seventh are recovered, and hoped past danger[103].”

The following table shows the fever-mortalities for London, from 1718 onwards, and, for comparison, the excessive mortalities in the epidemics of 1710 and 1714:

[Pg 65]

London Mortalities from Fever, &c.

In country parishes, according to Short’s abstracts of registers, there was no unusual sickness in 1718 and 1719. But in market towns the mortality rose greatly in 1719, which had an excessively hot summer; and that was the year when the synochus or typhus described by Wintringham reached its worst at York. The mortality kept high for several years after 1719.

Market Towns.

The high mortalities in 1721-23 were mostly from smallpox, exact figures of many of the epidemics in Yorkshire and elsewhere being given in the chapter on that disease. The country parishes shared in its prevalence:

[Pg 66]

Country Parishes.

Besides smallpox, diarrhoeas and dysenteries in the autumn are given by Wintringham as the reigning maladies, fever not being mentioned.

The Epidemic Fevers of 1726-29: evidence of Relapsing Fever.

The four years 1726-29 were a great fever-period in London, the deaths having been as follows:

In the last of those years the entry in the annual bills becomes “fever, malignant fever, spotted fever and purples.”

The following are the weekly maxima of fever deaths and deaths from all causes during the four years, 1726-29; in nearly all the weeks the deaths from “convulsions” (generic name for most of the maladies of infants) contribute from a fourth to a third, or even more, of the whole mortality.

[Pg 67]These are high mortalities, whatever were the types of fever that caused them. That the old pestilential fever of London was one of them we need have no doubt. Dr John Arbuthnot, writing two or three years after, said, “I believe one may safely affirm that there is hardly any year in which there are not in London fevers with buboes and carbuncles [the distinctive pestilential marks]; and that there are many petechial or spotted fevers is certain[105].”

The essay of Strother also has a reference to “spotted fever” in its title, although the text throws very little light upon it[106]. But, for the rest, the “constitution” of 1727-29 is more than usually perplexing. There was an influenza at the end of 1729, which can be separated from the rest easily enough by the help of the London weekly bills of mortality; and it is probable, unless Arbuthnot, Huxham and Rutty have erred in their dates, that one or more epidemics of catarrhal fever had occurred before that, in the years 1727 and 1728. The greatest difficulty is with a certain “little fever,” or “hysteric fever,” or “febricula,” which gave rise to some writing and a good deal of talk. Strother does not specially treat of it, at least under that name, although he says that “many, especially women, have been subject to fits of vapours, cold sweats, apprehensions, and unaccountable fears of death; every small disappointment dejected them, tremblings and weakness attended them,” etc. (p. 116); and again, “never was a season when apoplexies, palsies and other obstructions of the nerves did prevail so much as they do at present, and have done for some time past” (p. 102); while he had frequently seen hysterical and hypochondriacal symptoms, dejection of spirits and the like remaining behind the fever (p. 109). For some years before this, much had been heard in London of the vapours, the “hypo,” the spleen, and the like, an essay by Dr Mandeville, better known by his ‘Fable of the Bees,’ having first made these maladies fashionable in the year 1711[107].

[Pg 68]In due time it began to be noticed that symptoms which many physicians made light of as a “fit of vapours” were really the beginning of a fever. Dr Blackmore, in an essay on the Plague written in 1721, admitted the ambiguity:

In 1730, Dr William Cockburn, in a polemic against the physicians whom he styles “the academical cabal” (because they objected to his secret electuary for dysentery), professes to give a history of the mistakes of the faculty in London over this “little fever,” or “hysteric fever,” which often became dangerous[109]:

At length, he continues, Blackmore admitted the ambiguity of diagnosis, while Mead, Freind and others, recognized that there was really such a thing as a slow, nervous fever, by no means free from danger to life. It is probably to this insidious fever that Strother refers:

These indications, dispersed throughout the rambling essay of Strother, point somewhat plainly to relapsing fever[110]. But his theoretical pathology comes in to obscure the whole matter. He explains everything by obstructions. The jaundice was due to obstruction of the liver by “styptics,” the hysteric symptoms to obstructions of the nerves; there were also theoretical obstructions of the mesentery, part of the matter being sometimes “thrown off into the mesenteric glands”; also “congestions” or phlegmons of the liver, spleen and pancreas. But it is when he comes to the bowels that his subjective morbid anatomy becomes truly misleading. There is nothing to show that Strother examined a single body dead of this fever. He says, however, in his à priori way: “The crisis of these slow fevers is generally deposited on the bowels.... The lent fever is a symptomatical fever, arising from an inflammation, or an ulcer fixed on some of the bowels. A lent fever, depending on some fixed cause of the bowels, must be cured by having regard to those causes some of which I shall enumerate”:—the first supposition being that the fever depends on phlegmons by congestion of “the liver, spleen, pancreas, or the mesentery”; the second, if it depends on extravasations in an equally comprehensive range of viscera; the third, “if it depends on an ulcer, then all vulneraries must be administered internally; but to speak truth, when the viscera are ulcerated, there remains but small hope of life”; the fourth supposition is worms, the fifth[Pg 70] corruption of the humours. All this is paper pathology. There is not a single precise fact relating to ulcerated Peyer’s patches, or to swollen mesenteric glands, or to enlarged spleen, which last would have been equally distinctive of relapsing as of enteric fever; it is “the viscera” that are ulcerated, or congested, or extravasated, or it is “some of the bowels,” or the pancreas and liver obstructed as well as the spleen, the obstruction of the liver being invoked to explain the highly significant jaundice.

It is not quite clear whether Strother’s fever with relapses and jaundice corresponded exactly to the little fever, hysteric fever, or nervous fever of the same years; but it is worthy of note that relapsing fever in Ireland a century later was called febricula or the “short fever.” It was not until 1746 that the excellent essay upon it by Sir Richard Manningham was written. By that time a good deal was being said in various parts of Britain of a slow, nervous, or putrid fever, Huxham, in particular, identifying the nervous fever with Manningham’s febricula or little fever[111]. Some have supposed that the nervous fever of the 18th century included cases of enteric fever, if it did not stand for that disease exclusively. Murchison takes Manningham’s essay to be “an excellent description of enteric fever, under the title of febricula or little fever, etc.[112]” The following are brief extracts from his description, by which the reader will be able to form his own opinion on the question of identity[113].

This fever-period in London corresponds on the whole closely with a series of unhealthy years in Short’s tables from the registers of market towns and country parishes, and with high mortalities in the Norwich register. It was not specially a smallpox period, as the last unhealthy year, 1723, was. On the other hand the epidemiographists in Yorkshire, Devonshire and Ireland dwell most upon fevers of the nature of typhus, some of which were due to famine or dearth, and upon “agues.”

Market Towns.

Norwich.

Country Parishes.

The best epidemiologists of the time were not in London, but at York, Ripon, Plymouth, Cork and Dublin. Leaving the Irish history to a separate chapter, we shall find in the annals of Wintringham, Hillary and Huxham a somewhat detailed account of the fevers which caused the very high mortalities of the years 1727-29, with an occasional glimpse of the circumstances in which the fevers arose. Much of what follows relates to the same nervous, hysteric or “putrid” fever, with or without relapses, that has been described for London. Going back a[Pg 72] little, Wintringham says[115] that the continued fevers of 1720 were milder than those of the year before (which were synochus or typhus) and were often languid or nervous, with giddiness, stupor and nervous tremblings, a quick pulse, a whitish tongue, no thirst, and sweats of the head, neck and chest: this fever lasted twenty days or more, and ended in a general sweat. He had mentioned the “languid nervous fevers” first in the years 1716 and 1717, and he mentions them again as mixed with or following the synochus or typhus of 1727-28.

In April, 1727, there were fevers prevalent, remitting and intermitting, but with uncertain paroxysms; in May, a fever with pleuritic pains; in July, a putrid fever in some, but the chief diseases of that month were “remittents and intermittents,” which were often attended by cutaneous eruptions, sometimes of dusky colour and dry, at other times full of clear serum; which, “as they depended upon a scorbutic taint, tormented the sick with pruritus.” The sick persons in these remittents were for the most part drowsy and stupid, especially during the paroxysm; the fevers were followed by lassitude, debility, languor of spirits and hysteric symptoms.

Hillary[116], who practised at Ripon, not far from Wintringham, at York, records in 1726 the prevalence of remittents and intermittents: “some had exanthematous eruptions towards the latter end of the disease, filled with a clear or yellowish water, which went or dried away without any other inconvenience to the sick but an uneasy itching for a few days”—just as Wintringham had described a miliary fever for 1727. It is also under 1726 that he describes the same drowsy and nervous symptoms of Wintringham’s summer fever of 1727:

[Pg 73]There can be little doubt that England in 1727 was already suffering in a measure from the distress that was acutely felt in Ireland; it was much aggravated by the hard winter of 1728-29[117], but it had begun before that and was doubtless the indirect cause of the great prevalence of sickness. The exports of corn under the bounty system used to bring two or three millions of money into the country in a year. But in 1727 there was a debt balance of 70,757 quarters of wheat imported, and in 1728 the import exceeded the export by 21,322 quarters, the price rising at the same time from 4s. to 8s. per bushel[118]. Under the year 1727 Hillary says:

The Yorkshire accounts by Wintringham and Hillary for the second year of this epidemic period, the year 1728, are very full, as regards the symptoms or types of the fevers; but it would be tedious to cite them at length, and unnecessary to do so unless to answer the not inconceivable cavil that the fevers were not of the nature of typhus in one or other of its forms. The chief point is that the second year, towards Midsummer, brought a fever with the symptoms of synochus, and not rarely marked with small red spots like fleabites or with purple petechiae. In the autumn of 1729, Hillary noticed a fever of a slow type, which might go on as long as thirty days and end without a perfect crisis—the nearest approach to enteric fever in any of the descriptions. For the same years, 1727-29, Huxham, of[Pg 74] Plymouth, describes languid fevers of the “putrid” type, with profuse sweating, followed by typhus of a more spotted type. Like the Yorkshire observer, Huxham mentions also “intermittents” as mixed with the continued fevers.

The great prevalence of these fevers, “intermittents and other fevers,” in the west of England in 1728-29 was known to Dr Rutty of Dublin, who speaks especially of “the neighbourhoods of Gloucester and London, and very mortal in the country places, but less in the cities.” This is confirmed by Dover:

Some of the cases of nervous or putrid fever in the epidemics of 1727-29 appear to have been marked by relapses in the country districts as well as in London. Huxham says under date of April, 1728, that those who had wholly got rid of the putrid fever were exceedingly apt to have relapses. Hillary does not mention relapses until March, 1733, when a fever, with many hysterical symptoms, which succeeded the influenza of that year, relapsed in several, “though seemingly perfectly recovered before.” But he seems really to be contrasting relapsing fever and typhus when he points out that, whereas the inflammatory type of fever in the first year of the epidemic (1727) was greatly benefited by enormous phlebotomies, the fever patients in the two seasons following, when the fever was more of the nature of spotted typhus, could not stand the loss of so much blood, or, it might be, the loss of any blood[120]. This was precisely the remark made by Christison and others a century later, when the inflammatory synocha, which often had the relapsing type very marked, changed to the spotted typhus.

[Pg 75]From the year 1731 we begin to have annual accounts (soon discontinued) of the reigning maladies in Edinburgh, on the same plan as Wintringham’s, Hillary’s and Huxham’s, with which, indeed, they are sometimes collated and compared[121]. The fevers of Edinburgh and the villages near were as various as those of Plymouth, according to Huxham, and singularly like the latter. Thus, in the winter of 1731-32, there was much worm fever, comatose fever, or convulsive fever among children, but not limited to children, marked by intense pain in the head, raving in some, stupor in others, tremulous movements, leaping of the tendons, and all the other symptoms described by Willis for the fever of 1661, a fatal case of October, 1732, in a boy of ten, recorded by St Clair one of the Edinburgh professors, reading exactly like the cases of Willis already given[122]. St Clair’s case, which was soon fatal, had no worms; but in the general accounts, both for the winter of 1731-32 and the autumn of 1732, it is said that many of the younger sort passed worms, both teretes and ascarides, and recovered, the fatalities among children being, as usual, few. In March and April, 1735, there were again “very irregular fevers of children.” Huxham records exactly the same “worm-fever” of children at Plymouth in the spring of 1734—a fever with pains in the head, languor, anxiety, oppression of the breast, vomiting, diarrhoea, and a comatose state (affectus soporosus), which attacked the young mostly, and was often attended by the passage of worms. He gives the same account of the seasons as Gilchrist—the years 1734 and 1735 marked by almost continual rains, the country more squalid than had been known for some years[123].

But it is the nervous fever that chiefly engrosses attention both in Scotland and in England. In 1735, Dr Gilchrist, of Dumfries, made it the subject of an essay, returning to the subject a few years after[124]. “As our fever,” he says, “seems to be peculiar to this age, it is not a little surprising that much more has not been said upon it.” He is not sure whether its frequency of late years may not be owing to the manner of living (it was the time of the great drink-craze, which Huxham[Pg 76] also connects with the reigning maladies) and to a long course of warm, rainy seasons; the winters for some years had been warm and open, and the summers and harvests rainy. It was only the poorer sort and those a degree above them who were subject to this fever; he knew but few instances of it amongst those who lived well, and none amongst wine-drinkers. It was in some insidious in its approach; those who seemed to be in no danger the first days for the most part died. In others the onset was violent, with nausea, heat, thirst and delirium. Among the symptoms were looseness, pains in the belly, local sweating, tickling cough, leaping of the tendons. Sometimes they were in continual cold clammy sweats; at other times profuse sweats ran from them, as if water were sprinkled upon them, the skin feeling death cold.

At Edinburgh, from October, 1735, to February, 1736, the fever became very common, and was often a relapsing fever.

These evidences, beginning with Strother’s for London in 1728 and extending to the Edinburgh record of 1735, must suffice to identify true relapsing fever. In the chapter on Irish fevers we shall find clear evidence of relapsing fever in Dublin in 1739, before the great famine had begun.

Huxham’s account of the fevers at Plymouth, in Devonshire generally, and in Cornwall about the years 1734-36 is of the first importance. It is highly complex, owing to the prevalence of an affection of the throat, so that one part of the constitution is “anginose fever.” This has been dealt with in the chapter on Scarlatina and Diphtheria. Another part was true typhus. In his account of the nervous fever we are introduced, as in the Yorkshire annals, 1726-27, to a phenomenon that was almost distinctive of the low, nervous or putrid fever from about 1750 to 1760 or longer, namely, the eruption of red, or purple, or white watery vesicles, from which it got the name of miliary fever. Huxham’s annals are full of this phenomenon about the[Pg 77] years 1734-36[126]. The red pustules, or white pustules, with attendant ill-smelling sweats, are mentioned over and over again. He thought them critical or relieving: “Happy was then the patient who broke out in sweats or in red pustules.” These fevers are said to have extended to the country parts of Devonshire, after they had ceased in Plymouth, and to Cornwall in August, 1736. In Plymouth itself the type of fever changed after a time to malignant spotted fever, synochus, or true typhus.

The malignant epidemic seemed to have been brought in by the fleet; it had raged for a long time among the sailors of the fleet lying at Portsmouth, and had destroyed many of them. In March, 1735, it was raging among the lower classes of Plymouth. About the 10th day of the fever, previously marked by various head symptoms, there appeared petechiae, red or purple, or livid or black, up to the size of vibices or blotches, or the eruption might be more minute, like fleabites. A profuse, clammy, stinking sweat, or a most foetid diarrhoea wasted the miserable patients. A black tongue, spasms, hiccup, and livid hands presaged death about the 11th to 14th day. So extensive and rapid was the putrefaction of the bodies that they had to be buried at once or within twenty-four hours. It was fortunate for many to have had a mild sweat and a red miliary eruption about the 4th or 5th day; but for others the course of the disease was attended with great risk. In April the type became worse, and the disease more general. There was rarely now any constriction of the throat. Few pustules broke out; but in place of them there were dusky or purple and black petechiae, and too often livid blotches, with which symptoms very many died both in April and May. In July this contagious fever had decreased much in Plymouth, and in September it was only sporadic there. With a mere reference to Hillary’s account of somewhat similar fevers at Ripon in 1734-5 (with profuse sweats, sometimes foetid, great fainting and sinking of spirits, starting of the limbs and beating of the tendons, hiccup for days, etc.[127]) we may pass to a more signal historical event, the great epidemic of fever in 1741-42, of which the Irish part alone has hitherto received sufficient notice[128].

 [Pg 78]

The epidemic fever of 1741-42.

The harvest of 1739 had been an abundant one, and the export of grain had been large. At Lady-day the price of wheat had been 31s. 6d. per quarter, and it rose 10s. before Lady-day, 1740. An extremely severe winter had intervened, one of the three memorable winters of the 18th century. The autumn-sown wheat was destroyed by the prolonged and intense frost, and the price at Michaelmas, 1740, rose to 56s. per quarter, the exportation being at the same time prohibited, but not until every available bushel had been sold to the foreigners. The long cold of the winter of 1739-40 had produced much distress and want in London, Norwich, Edinburgh and other towns. In London the mortality for 1740 rose to a very high figure, 30,811, of which 4003 deaths were from fever and 2725 from smallpox. In mid-winter, 1739-40, coals rose to £3. 10s. per chaldron, owing to the navigation of the Thames being closed by ice; the streets were impassable by snow, there was a “frost-fair” on the Thames, and in other respects a repetition of the events preceding the London typhus of 1685-86. The Gentleman’s Magazine of January, 1740, tells in verse how the poor were “unable to sustain oppressive want and hunger’s urgent pain,” and reproaches the rich,—“colder their hearts than snow, and harder than the frost”; while in its prose columns it announces that “the hearts of the rich have been opened in consideration of the hard fate of the poor[129].” The long, hard winter was followed by the dry spring and hot summer of 1740, during which the sickness (in Ireland at least) was of the dysenteric type. In the autumn of 1740 the epidemic is said to have taken origin both at Plymouth and Bristol from ships arriving with infection among the men—at the former port the king’s ships ‘Panther’ and ‘Canterbury,’ at the latter a merchant ship. At Plymouth it was certainly raging enormously from June to the end of the year—“febris nautica pestilentialis jam saevit maxime,” says Huxham; it continued[Pg 79] there all through the first half of 1741, “when it seemed to become lost in a fever of the bilious kind.” It was in the dry spring and very hot summer of 1741 that the fever became general over England. Wall says that it appeared at Worcester at the Spring Assizes among a few; at Exeter also it was traced to the gaol delivery; and it was commonly said that the turmoil of the General Election (which resulted in driving Walpole from his long term of power) helped its diffusion. But undoubtedly the great occasion of its universality was a widely felt scarcity. The rise in the price of wheat was small beside the enormous leaps that prices used to take in the medieval period, having been at no time double the average low price of that generation. It was rather the want of employment that made the pinch so sharp in 1741. The weaving towns of the west of England were losing their trade; of “most trades,” also, it was said that they were in apparent decay, “except those which supply luxury[130].” Dr Barker, of Sarum, the best medical writer upon the epidemic, says:

He explains that the price of wheat had driven the poor to live on bad bread. This is borne out by a letter from Wolverhampton, 27 November, 1741[132]. The writer speaks of the extraordinary havoc made among the poorer sort by the terrible fever that has for some time raged in most parts of England and Ireland. At first it seldom fixed on any but the poor people, and especially such as lived in large towns, workhouses, or prisons. Country people and farmers seemed for the most part exempt from it, “though we have observed it frequently in villages near market towns”; whereas, says the writer, the epidemic fevers of 1727, 1728 and 1729 were first observed to begin among the country people, and to be some time in advancing to large towns. This writer’s theory was that the fever was caused by bad bread, and he alleges that[Pg 80] horse-beans, pease and coarse unsound barley were almost the only food of the poor. To this a Birmingham surgeon took exception[133]. Great numbers of the poor had, to his knowledge, lived almost entirely upon bean-bread, but had been very little afflicted with the fever. Besides, every practitioner knew that the fever was not confined to the poor. He pointed out that in Wolverhampton, whence the bad-bread theory emanated, the proportion of poor to those in easier circumstances was as six to one, poverty having increased so much by decay of trade that many wanted even the necessaries of life. The Birmingham surgeon was on the whole inclined to the theory of “the ingenious Sydenham, that the disease may be ascribed to a contagious quality in the air, arising from some secret and hidden alterations in the bowels of the earth, passing through the whole atmosphere, or to some malign influence in the heavenly bodies”—these being Sydenham’s words as applied to the fever of 1685-6.

Barker, also, draws a parallel between the epidemic of 1741 and that of 1685-86: the Thames was frozen in each of the two winters preceding the respective epidemics, and the spring and summer of 1740 and 1741 were as remarkable for drought and heat as those of 1684 and 1685.

In London the deaths from fever in 1741 reached the enormous figure of 7528, the highest total in the bills of mortality from first to last, while the deaths from all causes were 32,119, in a population of some 700,000, also the highest total from the year of the great plague until the new registration of the whole metropolitan area in 1838. It will be seen from the following table (on p. 81) of the weekly mortalities that the fever-deaths rose greatly in the autumn, but, unlike the old plague, reached a maximum in the winter.

The effects of the epidemic of typhus upon the weaving towns of the west of England, in which the fever lasted, as in London, into the spring of 1742, were seen at their worst in the instance of Tiverton. It was then a town of about 8000 inhabitants, having increased little during the last hundred years. Judged by the burials and baptisms in the parish register it was a more unhealthy place since the extinction of plague than it had been before that. It was mostly a community of weavers, who had not been in prosperous[Pg 81] circumstances for sometime past. In 1735 the town had been burned down, and in 1738 it was the scene of riots. The hard winter of 1739-40 brought acute distress, and in 1741 spotted fever was so prevalent that 636 persons were buried in that year, being 1 in 12 of the inhabitants. At the height of the epidemic ten or eleven funerals were seen at one time in St Peter’s churchyard. Its population twenty years after is estimated to have declined by two thousand, and at the end of the 18th century it was a less populous place than at the beginning[134].

Mortality by Fever in London, 1741-42.

Effects of the Epidemic of 1741-42 on Provincial Towns.
(Short’s Abstracts of Parish Registers.)

[Pg 82]Other parts of the kingdom may be represented by Norwich, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The record of baptisms in Norwich is almost certainly defective; in only two years from 1719 to 1741, is a small excess of baptisms over burials recorded, namely, in 1722 and 1726, while in a third year, 1736, the figures are exactly equal. In 1740 there are 916 baptisms to 1173 burials, and in 1741, 851 baptisms to 1456 burials; while in 1742, owing to an epidemic of smallpox, the deaths rose to 1953, or to more than double the recorded births[135]. The distress was felt most in East Anglia in 1740. Blomefield, who ends his history in that year, says there was much rioting throughout the kingdom, “on the pretence of the scarcity and dearness of grain.” At Wisbech Assizes fourteen were found guilty, but were not all executed. In Norfolk two were convicted and executed accordingly. At Norwich the military fired upon the mob and killed seven persons, of whom only one was truly a rioter[136]. It was also in the severe winter of 1739-40 that the distress began in Edinburgh. The mills were stopped by ice and snow, causing a scarcity of meal; the harvest of 1740 was bad, riots took place in October, and granaries were plundered[137]. The deaths from fever were many in 1740, but were nearly doubled in 1741, with a significant accompaniment of fatal dysentery[138]:

Edinburgh Mortalities, 1740-41.

(Population in 1732, estimated at 32,000.)[139]

[Pg 83]The last four items are of children’s maladies, for which Edinburgh was worse reputed even than London.

At Newcastle the deaths in the register in 1741 were 320 more than in 1740, in which year they were doubtless excessive, as elsewhere. But there is a significant addition: “There have also been buried upwards of 400 upon the Ballast Hills near this town[140].”

The symptoms of the epidemic fever of 1741-42 are described by Barker, of Salisbury, and Wall, of Worcester[141]. It began like a common cold, as was remarked also in Ireland. On the seventh day spots appeared like fleabites on the breast and arms; in some there were broad purple spots like those of scurvy. Miliary eruptions were apt to come out about the eleventh day, especially in women. In most, after the first six or seven days, there was a wonderful propensity to diarrhoea, which might end in dysentery. The cough, which had appeared at the outset, went off about the ninth day, when stupor and delirium came on. Gilchrist, of Dumfries, describes the fever there in November, 1741, as more malignant than the “nervous fever” which he had described in 1735. It came to an end about the fourteenth day; the sick were almost constantly under a coma or raving, and they died of an absolute oppression of the brain; a profuse sweat about the seventh day was followed by an aggravation of all the symptoms[142]. An anonymous writer, dating from Sherborne, uses the occasion to make an onslaught upon blood-letting[143].

 [Pg 84]

Sanitary Condition of London under George II.

The great epidemic of fever in 1741-42 was the climax of a series of years in London all marked by high fever mortalities. If there had not been something peculiarly favourable to contagious fever in the then state of the capital, it is not likely that a temporary distress caused by a hard winter and a deficient harvest following should have had such effects. This was the time when the population is supposed to have stood still or even declined in London. Drunkenness was so prevalent that the College of Physicians on 19 January, 1726, made a representation on it to the House of Commons through Dr Freind, one of their fellows and member for Launceston:

“This state of things,” said the College, “doth every year increase.” Fielding guessed that a hundred thousand in London lived upon drink alone; six gallons per head of the population per annum is an estimate for this period, against one gallon at present. The enormous duty of 20s. per gallon served only to develope the trade in smuggled Hollands gin and Nantes brandy. In the harvest of 1733 farmers in several parts of Kent were obliged to offer higher wages, although the price of grain was low, and could hardly get hands on any terms, “which is attributed to the great numbers who employ themselves in smuggling along the coast[145].”

The mean annual deaths were never higher in London, not even in plague times over a series of years, the fever deaths keeping pace with the mortality from all causes, and, in the great epidemic of typhus in 1741, making about a fourth part of the whole. The populace lived in a bad atmosphere, physical and moral. As Arbuthnot said in 1733, they “breathed their own steams”; and he works out the following curious sum:

In the growth of London from a medieval walled city of some forty or sixty thousand inhabitants to the “great wen” of Cobbett’s time, these considerations had been little attended to so far as concerned the quarters of the populace. The Liberties of the City and the out-parishes were covered with aggregates of houses all on the same plan, or rather want of plan. In the medieval period the extramural population built rude shelters against the town walls or in the fosse, if it were dry, or along the side of the ditch. The same process of squatting at length extended farther afield, with more regular building along the sides of the great highways leading from the gates. Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation of 1580 was designed to check the growth of London after this irregular fashion; but as neither the original edict nor the numerous copies of it, reissued for near a hundred years, made any provision for an orderly expansion of the capital, these prohibitions had merely the effect of adding to the hugger-mugger of building, “in odd corners and over stables.” The outparishes were covered with houses and tenements of all kinds, to which access was got by an endless maze of narrow passages or alleys; regular streets were few in them, and it would appear from the account given by John Stow in 1598 of the parish of Whitechapel that even the old country highway, one of the great roads into Essex and the eastern counties, had been “pestered[147].” The “pestering” of the field lanes in the suburban parishes with poor cottages is Stow’s frequent theme[148].[Pg 86] The borough of Southwark, as part of the City, may have been better than most: “Then from the Bridge straight towards the south a continual street called Long Southwark, built on both sides with divers lanes and alleys up to St George’s Church, and beyond it through Blackman Street towards New Town or Newington”—the mazes of courts and alleys on either side of the Borough Road which may be traced in the maps long after Stow’s time. So again in St Olave’s parish along the river bank eastwards from London Bridge—“continual building on both sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown, and towards Rotherhithe.” In the Western Liberty, the lanes that had been laid out in Henry VIII.’s time, Shoe Lane, Fetter Lane and Chancery Lane, served as three main arteries to the densely populated area between Fleet Street and Holborn, but for the rest it was reached by a plexus or rete mirabile of alleys and courts, notorious even in the 19th century. In like manner Drury Lane and St Martin’s Lane were the main arteries between High Holborn and the Strand. One piazza of Covent Garden was a new centre of regular streets, to which the haberdashers and other trades were beginning to remove from the City, for greater room, about 1662. The Seven Dials were a wonder when they were new, about 1694, and had the same intention of openness and regularity as in Wren’s unused design for the City after the fire. The great speculative builder of the Restoration was Nicholas Barbone, son of Praise-God Barbones. He built over Red Lion Fields, much to the annoyance of the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn[149], and his manner of building may be inferred from the following:

In these mazes of alleys, courts, or “rents” the people were for the most part closely packed. Overcrowding had been the rule since the Elizabethan proclamation of 1580, and it seems to have become worse under the Stuarts. On February 24, 1623,[Pg 87] certain householders of Chancery Lane were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions for subletting, “to the great danger of infectious disease, with plague and other diseases.” In May, 1637, one house was found to contain eleven married couples and fifteen single persons; another house harboured eighteen lodgers. In the most crowded parishes the houses had no sufficient curtilage, standing as they did in alleys and courts. When we begin to have some sanitary information long after, it appears that their vaults, or privies, were indoors, at the foot of the common stair[151]. In 1710, Swift’s lodging in Bury Street, St James’s, for which he paid eight shillings a week (“plaguy deep” he thought), had a “thousand stinks in it,” so that he left it after three months. The House of Commons appears to have been ill reputed for smells, which were specially remembered in connexion with the hot summer of the great fever-year 1685[152].

The newer parts of London were built over cesspools, which were probably more dangerous than the visible nuisances of the streets satirized by Swift and Gay. There were also the “intramural” graveyards; of one of these, the Green Ground, Portugal Street, it was said by Walker, as late as 1839; “The effluvia from this ground are so offensive that persons living in the back of Clement’s Lane are compelled to keep their windows closed.” But that which helped most of all to make a foul atmosphere in the houses of the working class, an atmosphere in which the contagion of fever could thrive, was the window-tax. It is hardly possible that those who devised it can have foreseen how detrimental it would be to the public health; it took nearly a century to realize the simple truth that it was in effect a tax upon light and air.

 [Pg 88]

The Window-Tax.

Willan, writing of fever in London in 1799, mentions that even the passages of tenement houses were “kept dark in order to lessen the window-tax,” and the air therefore kept foul[153]. Ferriar, writing of Manchester in the last years of the 18th century, mentions, among other fever-dens, a large house in an airy situation which had been built for a poor’s-house, but abandoned: having been let to poor families for a very trifling rent, many of the windows and the principal entrance were built up, and the fever then became universal in it[154]. The Carlisle typhus described by Heysham for 1781 began in a house near one of the gates, tenanted by five or six very poor families; they had “blocked up every window to lessen the burden of the window-tax[155].” John Howard’s interest having been excited in the question of gaol-fever, he noted the effects of the window-tax not only in prisons but in other houses. The magistrates of Kent appear to have paid the tax for the gaols in that county from the county funds; but in most cases the burden fell on the keepers of the gaols.

Such impressions are known to be often fallacious; but in the history of the window-tax, which we shall now follow, it will appear that there was a new law, with increased stringency, in the years 1746-1748, corresponding to the “twenty or thirty years ago” of Howard’s recollection.

The window-tax was originally a device of the statesmen of the Revolution “for making good the deficiency of the clipped money.” By the Act of 7 and 8 William and Mary, cap. 18, taking effect from the 25th March, 1696, every inhabited house owed duty of two shillings per annum, and, over and above such duty on all inhabited houses, every dwelling-house with ten windows owed four shillings per annum, and every house with[Pg 89] twenty windows eight shillings. In 1710 houses with from twenty to thirty windows were made to pay ten shillings, and those with more than thirty windows twenty shillings. Various devices were resorted to to check the evasions of bachelors, widows and others. A farmer had to pay for his servants, recouping himself from their wages. A house subdivided into tenements was to count as one; which would have made the tax difficult to gather except from the landlord. The machinery of collection was a board of commissioners, receivers-general and collectors.

But in the 20th of George II. (1746) the basis of the law was changed. The tax was levied upon the several windows of a house, so much per window, so that it fell more decisively than before upon the tenants of tenement-houses, and not on the landlords. The two-shillings house duty was continued; but the window-tax became sixpence per annum for every window of a house with ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen or fourteen windows, or lights, ninepence for every window of a house with fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen or nineteen windows, and one shilling for every window of a house with twenty or more windows. An exemption in the Act in favour of those receiving parochial relief was decided by the law officers of the Crown not to apply to houses with ten or more windows or lights, which would have included most tenement-houses; on the other hand they ruled that hospitals, poor-houses, workhouses, and infirmaries were not chargeable with the window duty. To remove doubts and check evasions another Act was made in 21 George II. cap. 10. All skylights, and lights of staircases, garrets, cellars and passages were to count for the purpose of the tax; also certain outhouses, but not others, were to count as part of the main dwelling whether they were contiguous or not. The 11th paragraph of the Amendment Act shows how the law had been working in the course of its first year: “No window or light shall be deemed to be stopped up unless such window or light shall be stopped up effectually with stone or brick or plaister upon lath,” etc.

This remained the law down to 1803, when a change was made back to the original basis of rating houses as a whole, according to the number of their windows, the rate being considerably raised and fixed according to a schedule. The tax for tenement houses was at the same time made recoverable[Pg 90] from the landlord. The window-tax thus became a form of the modern house-tax, rated upon windows instead of upon rental, and so lost a great part of its obnoxious character.

The law of 1747-48, which taxed each window separately, and was enforced by a galling and corrupt machinery of commissioners, receivers-general and collectors paid by results, could not fail to work injuriously; for light and air, two of the primary necessaries of life, were in effect taxed. Even rich men appear to have taken pleasure in circumventing the collectors[157]. But it was among the poor, and especially the inhabitants of tenement houses, that the effect was truly disastrous; a tax on the skylights of garrets and on the lights of cellars, staircases and passages, taught the people to dispense with them altogether. Towards the end of the 18th century the grievance became now and then the subject of a pamphlet or a sermon.

Gaol-Fever.

Besides these ordinary things favouring contagious epidemic fever both in town and country, there were two special sources of contagion, the gaols and the fleets and armies. I shall take first the state of the gaols, which has been already indicated in speaking of the window-tax. In the opinion of Lind, a great part of the fever, which was a constant trouble in ships of the navy, came direct from the gaols through the pressing of newly discharged convicts.

The state of the prisons in the first half of the 18th century was certainly not better than Howard found it to be a generation after; it was probably worse, for the administration of justice was more savage. About the beginning of the century, many petitions were made to Parliament by imprisoned debtors, complaining of their treatment, and a Bill was introduced in 1702. Sixty thousand were said to be in prison for debt[158]. On 25[Pg 91] February, 1729, the House of Commons appointed a committee “to inquire into the state of the gaols of this Kingdom”; but only two prisons were reported on, the Fleet and the Marshalsea, in London, the inquiries upon these being due to the energy of Oglethorpe, then at the beginning of his useful career. The committee found a disgraceful state of things:—wardens, tip-staffs and turnkeys making their offices so lucrative by extortion that the reversion of them was worth large sums, prisoners abused or neglected if they could not pay, some prisoners kept for years after their term was expired, the penniless crowded three in a bed, or forty in one small room, while some rooms stood empty to await the arrival of a prisoner with a well-filled purse. On the common side of the Fleet Prison, ninety-three prisoners were confined in three wards, having to find their own bedding, or pay a shilling a week, or else sleep on the floor. The “Lyons Den” and women’s ward, which contained about eighteen, were very noisome and in very ill repair. Those who were well had to lie on the floor beside the sick. A Portuguese debtor had been kept two months in a damp stinking dungeon over the common sewer and adjoining to the sink and dunghill; he was taken elsewhere on payment of five guineas. In the Marshalsea there were 330 prisoners on the common side, crowded in small rooms. George’s ward, sixteen feet by fourteen and about eight feet high, had never less than thirty-two in it “all last year,” and sometimes forty; there was no room for them all to lie down, about one-half of the number sleeping over the others in hammocks; they were locked in from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. in summer (longer hours in winter), and as they were forced to ease nature within the room, the stench was noisome beyond expression, and it seemed surprising that it had not caused a contagion; several in the heat of summer perished for want of air. Meanwhile the room above was let to a tailor to work in, and no one allowed to lie in it. Unless the prisoners were relieved by their friends, they perished by famine. There was an allowance of pease from a casual donor who concealed his name, and 30 lbs. of beef three times a week from another charitable source. The starving person falls into a kind of hectic, lingers for a month or two and then dies, the right of his corpse to a coroner’s inquest being often scandalously[Pg 92] refused[159]. The prison scenes in Fielding’s Amelia are obviously faithful and correct.

Oglethorpe’s committee had done some good since they first met at the Marshalsea on 25th March, 1729, not above nine having died from that date to the 14th May; whereas before that a day seldom passed without a death, “and upon the advancing of the spring not less than eight or ten usually died every twenty-four hours.” Two of the chief personages concerned were found by a unanimous vote of the House of Commons to have committed high crimes and misdemeanours; but when they were tried before a jury on a charge of felony they were found not guilty.

About a year after these reports to the Commons there was a tragic occurrence among the Judges and the Bar of the Western Circuit during the Lent Assizes of 1730. The Bridewell at Taunton was filled for the occasion of the Assizes with drafts of prisoners from other gaols in Somerset, among whom several from Ilchester were said to have been more than ordinarily noisome. Over a hundred prisoners were tried, of whom eight were sentenced to death (six executed), and seventeen to transportation. As the Assize Court continued its circuit through Devon and Dorset several of its members sickened of the gaol fever and died: Piggot, the high-sheriff, on the 11th April, Sir James Sheppard, serjeant-at-law, on 13th April at Honiton, the crier of the court and two of the Judge’s servants at Exeter, the Judge himself, chief baron Pengelly, at Blandford, and serjeant-at-law Rous, on his return to London, whither he had posted from Exeter as soon as he felt ill[160]. It is said that the infection afterwards spread within the town of Taunton, where it arose, “and carried off some hundreds”; but the local histories make no mention of such an epidemic in 1730, and no authority is cited for it[161]. Something of the same kind is[Pg 93] believed to have happened at a gaol delivery at Launceston in 1742, but the circumstances are vaguely related, and it does not appear that any prominent personage in the Assize Court died on the occasion[162].

The great instance of a Black Assize in the 18th century, comparable to those of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter in the 16th[163], was that of the Old Bailey Sessions in London in April, 1750. It has been fully related by Sir Michael Foster, one of the justices of the King’s Bench, who had himself been on the bench at the January sessions preceding, and was the intimate friend of Sir Thomas Abney, the presiding judge who lost his life from the contagion of the April sessions[164].

The same thing was remarked here as at Exeter in 1586 that those who sat on the side of the Court nearest to the dock were most attacked by the infection[166]. When the cases of fever began to occur, after the usual incubation of “a week or ten days,” there was much fear of the infection spreading, so that many families, it is said, retired into the country[167]. But Pringle wrote on 24 May, “However fatal it has been since the Sessions, it is highly probable that the calamity will be in a great measure confined to those who were present at the tryal[168];” and Justice Foster gives no hint of anyone having taken the fever who was not present in court.

The tragedy of gaol-fever at the Old Bailey in 1750 secured increased attention to the subject of scientific ventilation. The great bar to fresh air indoors throughout the 18th century was the window-tax. It bore particularly hard on prisoners, for the gaolers had to pay the window-tax out of their profits, and they naturally preferred to build up the windows. Scientific ventilation of gaols was something of a mockery in these circumstances; but it is the business of science to find out cunning contrivances, and ingenious ventilators were devised for Newgate, the leading spirit in this work being the Rev. Dr Hales, rector of a parish near London, and an amateur in physiology at the meetings of the Royal Society.

A ventilating apparatus had been erected at Newgate about a year before the fatal sessions of 1650, but it does not seem to have answered. It consisted of tubes from the various wards meeting in a great trunk which opened on the roof. A committee of the Court of Aldermen in October 1750 resolved, after consulting Pringle and Hales, to add a windmill on the leads over the vent, and that was done about two years after. Pringle, who inspected the ventilator on 11 July, 1752, says that[Pg 95] a considerable stream of air of a most offensive smell issued from the vent; and it appeared that no fewer than seven of the eleven carpenters who were working at the alterations on the old ventilator caught gaol-fever (of the petechial kind), which spread among the families of some of them[169]. Pringle and Hales were of opinion that the wards furnished with tubes were less foul than the others; and they claimed, on the evidence of the man who took care of the apparatus, that only one person had died in the gaol in two months, whereas, before the windmill was used, there died six or seven in a week[170]. But Oglethorpe had claimed an improvement of the same kind at the Marshalsea in 1729 merely from having the prisoners saved from hunger; and Lind, who was a most matter-of-fact person, did not think that the ingenious contrivances for ventilation had answered their end[171].

Howard’s visitations of the prisons, which began in 1773 and were continued or repeated during several years following, brought to light many instances of epidemic sickness therein, which was nearly always of the nature of gaol-typhus. The following is a list compiled from his various reports, the two or three instances of smallpox infection being given elsewhere.

I shall add some medical experiences of gaol-fever in London from the notes of Lettsom[172]:—

[Pg 98]There was one Black Assize at this period, at Dublin in April 1776. A criminal, brought into the Court of Sessions without cleansing, infected the court and alarmed the whole city. Among others who died of the contagion were Fielding Ould, High Sheriff, the counsellors Derby, Palmer, Spring and Ridge, Mr Caldwell, Messrs Bolton and Eriven, and several attorneys and others whose business it was to attend the court[173].

There were two notorious outbreaks of malignant fever among foreign prisoners of war, one in 1761[174] and another in 1780[175], the first among French and Spaniards at Winchester and Portchester, the second among Spaniards at Winchester.

Howard found so little typhus in the gaols in his later visits that it seemed as if banished for good. But it was heard of frequently about 1780-85—at Maidstone, at Aylesbury, at Worcester, costing the lives of some of the visiting physicians.

Circumstances of severe and mild Typhus.

The circumstances of the gaol distemper bring out one grand character of typhus which will have to be stated formally before we go farther. Ordinary domestic typhus was not a very fatal disease. Haygarth says that of 285 attacked by it in the poorer quarters of Chester in the autumn of 1774, only twenty-eight died. Ferriar, in Manchester, had sometimes an even more favourable experience than that: “The mortality of the epidemic was not great, ... out of the first ninety patients whom I attended, only two died.” This was before the House of Recovery was opened; so that the low mortality was of typhus in the homes of the people.

The fever was often an insidious languishing, without great heat, and marked most by tossing and wakefulness, which might pass into delirium; when it went through the members of a family or the inmates of a house, there would be some cases concerning which it was hard to say whether they were cases of typhus or not. Misery and starvation brought it on, and often it was itself but a degree of misery and starvation. “I have found,” says Ferriar, “that for three or four days before the[Pg 99] appearance of typhus in a family consisting of several children, they had subsisted on little more than cold water.” “It has been observed,” says Langrish, “that those who have died of hunger and thirst, as at sieges and at sea, etc., have always died delirious and feverish.” The fever was on the whole a distinct episode, but in many cases it had no marked crisis. “Those women who recovered,” says Ferriar, “were commonly affected with hysterical symptoms after the fever disappeared;” and again: “Fevers often terminate in hysterical disorders, especially in women; men, too, are sometimes hysterically inclined upon recovering from typhus, for they experience a capricious disposition to laugh or cry, and a degree of the globus hystericus.” These were probably the more case-hardened people, inured to their circumstances, their healthy appetite dulled by the practice of fasting or “clemming,” or by opium, and their blood accustomed to be renovated by foul air. If the limit of subsistence be approached gradually, life may be sustained thereat without any sharp crisis of fever, or with only such an interlude of fever as differs but little from a habit of body unnamed in the nosology.

The worst kind of typhus, often attended with delirium, crying and raving, intolerable pains in the head, and livid spots on the skin, ending fatally perhaps in two or three days, or after a longer respite of stupor or waking insensibility, was commonly the typhus of those not accustomed to the minimum of well-being—the typhus of hardy felons newly thrown into gaol, of soldiers in a campaign crowded into a hospital after a season in the open air, of sailors on board ship mixing with newly pressed men having the prison atmosphere clinging to them, of judges, counsel, officials of the court and gentlemen of the grand jury brought into the same atmosphere with prisoners at a gaol-delivery, of the wife and children of a discharged prisoner returned to his home, of the gaol-keeper, gaol-chaplain, or gaol-doctor, of the religious and charitable who visited in poor localities even where no fever was known to be, and most of all of country people who crowded to the towns in search of work or of higher wages or of a more exciting life.

It was in these circumstances that the most fatal infections of typhus took place. Such extraordinary malignancy of typhus happened often when the type of sickness (if indeed there was definite disease at all) among the originally ailing[Pg 100] failed to account for it; it was the great disparity of condition that accounted for it. There were, however, more special occasions when a higher degree of malignancy than ordinary was bred or cultivated among the classes at large who were habitually liable to typhus. But even the old pestilential spotted fever which used to precede, accompany, and follow the plague itself, was fatal to a comparatively small proportion of all who had it. Thus, towards the end of the great London plague of 1625, on 18th October, Sir John Coke writes to Lord Brooke: “In London now the tenth person dieth not of those that are sick, and generally the plague seems changed into an ague[176].” One in ten is probably too small a fatality for the old pestilential fever; but that is the usually accepted proportion of deaths to attacks in the typhus fever of later times. The rate of fatality is got, naturally, by striking an average. But in truth an aggregate of typhus cases, however homogeneous in conventional symptoms or type-characters, was not always really homogeneous. We have seen that ninety cases of typhus could occur in the slums of Manchester with only two deaths. On the other hand there were outbreaks of gaol-fever in which half or more of all that were attacked died; and I suspect that the average fatality in typhus of one in ten was often brought up by an admixture of cases of healthy and well-conditioned people who caught a much more malignant type of fever from their contact with those inured to misery. To strike an average is in many instances a convenience and a help to the apprehension of a truth; but for the average to be instructive, the members of the aggregate must be more or less comparable in their circumstances. It has been truly said that there is no common measure between Lazarus and Dives as regards their subjective views of things; it is not a little strange to find that they are just as incommensurable in their risk of dying from the infection of typhus fever. The rule seems to be that the degree of acuteness or violence of an attack of typhus was inversely as the habitual poor condition of the victim. In adducing evidence of the tragic nature of typhus infection conveyed across the gulf of misery to the other side, I shall endeavour to keep strictly to the scientific facts, leaving the moral, if there be a moral (and it is not always obvious), to point itself.

Let us take first the common case of country-bred people[Pg 101] migrating to the towns. Any lodging in a crowded centre of industry and trade would be high-rented compared with the country cottage which they had left, and they would naturally gravitate to the slums of the city.

Two instances from the same author will show the severe type of the fever.

These are instances of country-bred people, plunging abruptly into the fever-dens of cities and catching a typhus[Pg 102] severe in the direct ratio of their ruddy, healthy condition. Another class of cases is that of persons carrying the atmosphere of a gaol into the company of healthy and otherwise favourably situated people. Howard gives a case: at Axminster a prisoner discharged from Exeter gaol in 1755 infected his family with the gaol-distemper, of which two of them died, and many others in that town. The best illustrations of the greater severity and fatality of typhus among the well-to-do come from Ireland, in times of famine, and will be found in another chapter. But it may be said here, so that this point in the natural history of typhus fever may not be suspected of exaggeration, that the enormously greater fatality of typhus (of course, in a smaller number of cases) among the richer classes in the Irish famines, who had exposed themselves in the work of administration, of justice, or of charity, rests upon the unimpeachable authority of such men as Graves, and upon the concurrent evidence of many.

Ship-Fever.

The prevalence of fevers in ships of war and transports from the Restoration onwards can be learned but imperfectly, and learned at all only with much trouble. Sir Gilbert Blane, who was not wanting in aptitude and had the archives of the Navy Office at his service, goes no farther back than 1779, from which date an account was kept of the causes of death in the naval hospitals. But the deaths on board ships of the fleet were not systematically recorded until 1811, when the Board of Admiralty instructed all commanders of ships of war to send to the Naval Office an annual account of all the deaths of men on board[179]. The sources of information for earlier periods are more casual.

The war with France, which dated from the accession of William III. and continued until the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, led to numerous conflicts with French and Spaniards in the West Indies, and to naval expeditions year after year. The loss of life from sickness in the British ships for a few years at the end of the century was such as can hardly be realized by us. Some part of it happened on the outward voyages, but by far the greater part of it was from the poison of yellow fever[Pg 103] which had entered the ships in the anchorages of West Indian colonies. It was probably to that cause that the enormous mortality in the fleet under Sir Francis Wheeler was owing. After some ineffective operations against the French in the Windward Islands in the winter of 1693-4, he sailed for North America with the intention of attacking Quebec. This he failed to do, having sailed from Boston for home on the 3rd of August without entering the St Lawrence. The reason of the failure was probably the extraordinary fatality which Cotton Mather, of Boston, professes to have heard from the admiral himself, namely, that he lost by a malignant fever on the passage from Barbados to Boston 1300 sailors out of 2100, and 1800 soldiers out of 2400[180].

Another instance comes from Carlisle Bay, Barbados. The slave ship ‘Hannibal’ arrived there in November, 1694, during a disastrous epidemic of yellow fever. Phillips, the captain, whose journal of the voyage is published[181], had great difficulty in saving his crew from being pressed into the king’s ships, which were short of men owing to the yellow fever. Captain Sherman, of the ‘Tiger,’ who convoyed the ‘Hannibal’ and other merchantmen back to England in April, 1695, told Phillips that he buried six hundred men out of his ship during the two years that he lay at Barbados, though his complement was but 220, “still pressing men out of the merchant ships that came in, to recruit his number in the room of those that died daily.”

These and other similar experiences of yellow fever in the West Indies, which might be collected from the naval history, do not come properly into this chapter; and I pass from them to ship-fever proper, having indicated how much of the loss of life abroad was due to yellow fever.

Some light is thrown upon the state of health on board ships of war on the home station by Dr William Cockburn, physician to the fleet, afterwards the friend of Swift, who calls him “honest Dr Cockburn.” He had a secret remedy for dysentery, which he succeeded in getting adopted by the Admiralty, greatly to his own emolument for many years after. Dining on[Pg 104] board one of the ships at Portsmouth, in 1696, with Lord Berkeley of Stratton, he brought up the subject of his electuary, and arranged for a public trial of it next day on board the ‘Sandwich.’ An uncertain number, which looks to have been about seven in Cockburn’s own account, but became seventy in the pamphlet which advertised the electuary after his death, were available for the trial and were speedily cured. Cockburn’s three essays on the health of seamen[182] leave no doubt as to the extensive prevalence of scurvy and the causes thereof; while his references to “malignant fever,” although they are, as usual, brought in to illustrate some doctrinal or theoretical point, give colour to the belief that ship-typhus may have been as common then as we know it to have been in the ships at Portsmouth and Plymouth, on the more direct testimony of Huxham in 1736, and of Lind twenty years later.

A naval surgeon of the time of William III. and Anne, was induced by his enthusiasm for blood-letting in fevers to record some of his experiences on board ship[183]. It was usually the lustiest, both of the young, strong and healthy people, and likewise of the elder sort, that died of fevers, the symptoms which proved so mortal having been delirium, phrenitis, coma or stupor, whether they occurred in the συνόχοι (of Sydenham) or in the συνεχεῖς (of the same author):

In 1703 and 1704 he was surgeon to two of Her Majesty’s ships “where a delirium, stupor and phrenitis” were found as symptoms of the fevers. In the summer of 1704, cruising in the latitudes of Portugal and Spain, the men brought on board from Lisbon unripe lemons with which they made great quantities of punch. This was the evident cause of a cholera morbus and dysentery: “after this we had a pretty many taken with the[Pg 105] synochus putris, and some with the causus” [malignant fever]. Most of these fevers went off by a crisis in sweating, “which was so large I had good reason to believe it judicatory.” In several the fevers left on the 9th, 10th or 11th day, and in almost all by the 14th. “About the latter end of July, and in August, there were many taken with a delirium and stupor or coma, and some with the phrenitis in their fever.” Among the symptoms was one which we find described for fevers on board ship on the West Coast of Africa at the same time—“soreness all over as if from blows with a cane,” a symptom afterwards associated with dengue. “Sometimes the bones (as they term it) don’t pain them much.” In some cases there were petechial spots as well as a stupor. In the month of August “the fevers with a stupor and phrenitis” came on apace. The treatment was to take ten ounces of blood every day from the second to the eighth day of the fever, to give tartar emetic in five-grain doses at the outset, and to administer cathartic glysters in the second half of the fever. “Seeing the lustiest men now ran no more hazard of their lives than any other who were usually taken with this fever, nor indeed so much, in the beginning of September I resolved, after all the phlebotomy was done in these fevers, to try the cathartic sooner.” Many of these who had accustomed themselves to the liberal use of spirituous liquors miscarried in the phrenitis.

White left the navy in 1704 and settled in practice at Lisbon, where he saw much fever. He had seen epidemics break out in British ships of war at anchor in the Tagus, crowded with men and prisoners. One case he mentions in a Lisbon woman, with continual synochus, stupor, and petechiae on the fifth day: “This was contagious, for she got it by going often to assist a gunner of a man-of-war, who came to her house with this distemper upon him: for many at the same time on board that ship were sick of that disease.” Among the causes of fever on board ship he mentions the effluvia of the bilge-water.

We owe it to the accident of the celebrated Dr Freind having accompanied Lord Peterborough’s expedition to Spain in 1705 that some account has been preserved of the sickness among the troops ashore and afloat[185].

The expedition of some 8000 men being then in its second year, fever and dysentery were by far the most common diseases, so common that “we can hardly turn, whether at sea or in camp, without finding them as if our inseparable companions and as if domesticated among us.” In the summer of the previous year there had been much fever both in the ships of the fleet and in the camp before Barcelona: “It was of the continual kind, though it usually remitted in the day time, and seemed to approach nearly to the stationary one which Sydenham has described in the years 1685 and 1686.” He then gives symptoms, which were on the whole those of the hospital fever to be afterwards described from Pringle’s medical account of the campaigns in 1743-48. Persons of a robust habit were affected more than others, and more severely, and carried off sooner. The others were generally taken away by a lingering death. “Some, when the fever seemed to have been wholly gone off lay four or five days without pain or sickness, though weak;[Pg 107] afterwards being suddenly seized with convulsions of the nerves they in a short time expired”—perhaps the phenomenon of relapse, which Lind recorded for ship-fever fifty years after and was seen among the troops landed from Corunna in 1809. In some few the parotids, or abscesses formed about the groin, carried off the disease.

Until the middle of the 18th century there are few other notices of ship-fever, but it is probable that Huxham’s accounts of a very malignant typhus among the crews of ships of war at Plymouth in 1735 (as well as at Portsmouth according to report), and again in 1741, are to be taken as samples of what might have been recorded on many occasions[186].

Fever and Dysentery of Campaigns: War Typhus, 1742-63.

The war in Ireland after the accession of William III. produced two remarkable instances of war-sickness, which are fully given in another chapter. The campaigns of Marlborough against the armies of Louis XIV., from 1704 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, appear to have found no historian from the medical side, nor does the duke refer to these matters in his dispatches or letters, beyond a remark in a letter to his wife from near Munich, 30 July, 1704, a fortnight before the battle[Pg 108] of Blenheim: “There having been no war in this country for above sixty years, these towns and villages are so clean that you would be pleased with them[187].”

The war of 1742-48, in which George II. joined Austria against France, produced the first good accounts of war typhus, on land and on board ship, in the writings of Pringle[188]. After the battle of Dettingen, 27 June, 1743, the men were exposed all night in the wet fields; during the next eight days five hundred of them were attacked with dysentery, and in a few weeks near half the army were either ill of it or had recovered from it. The dysentery continued all July and part of August, while the army lay at Hanau. The village of Feckenheim, a league from the camp, was used as a hospital, some 1500 being quartered in it, most of them ill at first of dysentery. The latrines appear to have been ill designed and badly kept. “A malignant fever began among the men, from which few escaped: for however mild or bad soever the flux was for which the person was sent to hospital, this fever almost surely supervened. The petechial spots, blotches, parotids, frequent mortifications, and the great mortality, characterized a pestilential malignity: in this it was worse than the true plague.... Of 14 mates employed about the hospital five died; and, excepting one or two, all the rest had been ill and in danger. The hospital lost nearly half of the patients; but the inhabitants of the village of Feckenheim, where the sick were, having first received the bloody flux, and afterwards the fever by contagion, were almost utterly destroyed[189].” The survivors from the sick troops in Feckenheim were removed to Neuwied, where they were relieved; “but the rest, who were mixed with them, caught the infection.” The mixed troops were sent still down the Rhine in bilanders, during which voyage “the fever became so virulent that above half the number died in the boats, and many of the remnant soon after their arrival.” A parcel of tents sent in these bilanders to the Low Countries were given to a Ghent tradesman to refit; he employed twenty-three journeymen upon them, “but these unhappy men were quickly seized with[Pg 109] this fever, whereof seventeen died.” They had no other communication with the infected but through the tents.

“These,” says Pringle, “are instances of high malignity. The common course of the infection is slow, and only catching to those constantly confined to the bad air. Sometimes one will have this fever about him for several days before it confines him to his bed; others I have known complain for weeks of the same symptoms without any regular fever at all; and some, after leaving the infectious place, have afterwards fallen ill of it[190].”

After the battle of Fontenoy on 11 May, 1745, the army was in good health: “the smallpox was the only new disease; it came with the recruits from England, but did not spread; and indeed we have never known it of any consequence in the field.”

On the Jacobite rebellion breaking out in Scotland later in the same year, some of the returning troops were ordered to disembark at Newcastle, Holy Island and Berwick. They had a long voyage, so that a kind of remitting fever which some of them had acquired in the autumn in the Low Countries was “by the crowds and the foul air of the hold soon converted into the jail distemper and became infectious.” At Newcastle most of the nurses and medical attendants of the extemporized hospital were seized with it, of whom three apothecaries, four apprentices and two journeymen died. But the most remarkable experience was on Holy Island. Of ninety-seven men taken out of the ships there, ill of the gaol-fever, forty died, “and the people of the place receiving the infection, in a few weeks buried fifty, the sixth part of the inhabitants of that island.” At Nairn and Inverness there was a singular experience in the spring of 1746. The ships which brought Houghton’s brigade to Nairn carried also thirty-six deserters to be tried by court-martial at the headquarters at Inverness: these men had deserted to the French in Flanders, had been found on board of a captured French transport carrying men to aid the Pretender, and had been thrown into gaol in England till an opportunity arose of sending them to their trial. Three days after the landing at Nairn of the force with which these deserters sailed, six of the officers were seized with fever and many of the men,[Pg 110] of whom eighty were left sick at Nairn; in the ten days that the regiment remained at Inverness it sent one hundred and twenty more to hospital, ill of the same fever, which became frequent also among the inhabitants of the town. “Though the virulence of the distemper diminished afterwards in their march to Fort Augustus and Fort William, yet the corps continued sickly for some time.” From the middle of February, 1746, when the army crossed the Forth, to the end of the campaign, there were two thousand sick in hospital, including wounded, of which number near three hundred died, mostly of the contagious fever[191].

After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the English troops embarked at Willemstad for home; “but the wind being contrary, several of the ships lay above a month at anchor, and, after all, meeting with a tedious and stormy passage, during which the men kept mostly below deck, the air was corrupted and produced the jail or hospital fever.” The ships that came to Ipswich were in the worst state, about four hundred men having been landed sick there, most of them ill of this contagious fever. The infection was at first as active and the mortality as great on shore as on board; but the virulence of the fever was at length subdued by dispersing the sick and convalescents as much as possible[192].

Monro gives a similar account of the camp sickness among the British troops during the campaigns in North Germany in 1760-63. In the autumn of 1760, before he joined the forces, there had been much malignant fever and dysentery: the camp at Warburg was near the battlefield (31 July, 1760), where many of the dead were scarce covered with earth; there were also many dead horses, and in a time of heavy rains, the camp, with the neighbouring villages and fields, was filled with the excrements of a numerous army. Not only the soldiers, but the inhabitants of the country, who were reduced to the greatest misery and want, were infected, and whole villages almost laid waste. When Monro joined at Paderborn in January, 1761, he found the hospitals overcrowded, and the malignancy of the fever thereby much increased, so that a great many died. “The 1st and 3rd regiments suffered most, owing to all the sick of each regiment being put into a particular hospital by themselves,[Pg 111] which kept up the infection, so that they lost one-third of those left ill of this fever, and many of the nurses and people who attended them were seized with it.” He distributed the sick men of the Coldstreams among the houses in the town, and lost few in comparison with the 1st and 3rd regiments. The contagion, under this bold policy, did not spread.

Two points in the symptoms are noteworthy: first the occurrence of suppurating buboes of the groins and armpits in several; and, secondly, the frequency of round worms.

He cannot explain the commonness of round worms in the sick, unless it was from the great quantity of crude vegetables and fruits eaten, and the bad water. Patients in convalescence often suffered from deafness, and from suppurating parotids. Some had frequent relapses into the fever, “which seemed to be owing to the irritation of these insects,” namely the worms. Most of those who fell into profuse, kindly, warm sweats recovered, the sweats lasting from twelve to forty-eight hours, and carrying off the fever. He never saw any miliary eruptions, and only sometimes petechiae, or small spots, or marbling as in measles[193].

Ship-Fever in the Seven Years’ War and American War.

Ship-fever would appear to have been at its worst after the middle of the 18th century. Dr James Lind joined Haslar Hospital in 1758, and brought to the naval medical service the same high qualities which Pringle and Monro brought to that of the army[194]. The smaller ships, such as the ‘Saltash’ sloop, the ‘Richmond’ frigate, and the ‘Infernal’ bomb were full of fever of the most malignant kind; of 120 men in the ‘Saltash,’ 80 were infected with a contagion much more virulent and dangerous than that in the guard-ships. The explanation was[Pg 112] that the smaller ships were receiving vessels for the larger ships, and were manned from the gaols; drafts from them carried the infection to the guard-ships and to the ships fitting out for foreign service. Malignant fever also arose on the voyage home from America[195]. In September and October 1758, after the reduction of Louisburg, several of the ships arriving at Spithead were infected with a malignant fever; three hundred men were received from them at Haslar Hospital (some with scurvy), of whom twenty-eight died. The ‘Edgar,’ having been manned at the Nore from gaols, sailed for the Mediterranean, and lost sixty men from fever and scurvy. The ‘Loestoffe,’ having lain in the St Lawrence for eight months in perfect health, took on board six convalescent men from Point Levi Hospital before sailing for home; in forty-eight hours, fifty out of her two hundred men were seized with fevers and fluxes, and six died on the voyage home. The ‘Dublin’ on the homeward voyage from Quebec buried nineteen, and on her arrival reported ninety men sick of fever, fluxes and scurvy. The ‘Neptune’ was said to have lost one hundred and sixty men in a few months, and reported 136 sick. The ‘Cambridge,’ with 650 men in health, sent three of her crew to the ‘Neptune’ laid up, to prepare her for the dock; of these three, one on the fifth day became spotted and died, and another narrowly escaped with life. The ‘Diana’ developed fever during a rough passage home from America. The ‘St George,’ having sailed from Spithead in 1760, met with rough weather and had to return on account of sickness. On the other hand, Hawke’s fleet of twenty ships of the line with fourteen thousand men, which defeated the French in November 1759, kept the Bay of Biscay for four months in the most perfect health.

From 1 July, 1758, to 1 July, 1760, there were 5743 admissions to Haslar Hospital, the chief diseases being as follows:

Of the fevers some were of an intermittent type, but by far the most were continued ship-typhus. Relapses were common, even to the sixth or seventh time. The fever varied a good[Pg 113] deal in malignity, but never produced buboes, livid blotches or mortifications, and seldom parotids. Twenty-four men received from January to March 1760 out of the ‘Garland’ had most of them petechial spots accompanied with other symptoms of malignity, and of these, five died or 20 per cent. But of 105 received during the same months from the ‘Postilion’ and ‘Liverpool’ only eight died, and those mostly of a flux. The infection had little tendency to spread among the attendants at Haslar. In the first six months only one nurse died; in 1759, two labourers and two nurses died, one of the nurses by infection, having concealed some infected shirts under her bed, the other by decay of nature. Of more than a hundred persons employed in various offices about the sick there died only those five in the course of eighteen months.

Brownrigg, of Whitehaven, gives a good instance of the diffusion of typhus in a newly-commissioned ship of war, and thence to the civil population, which bears out Lind’s favourite notion that the gaols and the press-gang had far-reaching effects. In the year 1757 a sloop of war had been hastily manned at the Nore to protect the shipping between the Irish and Cumberland ports. She reached Whitehaven in May, with fever on board. The men were landed and lodged in small houses. Brownrigg found about forty lying on the floor of three small rooms, very close together, many of them in a dying state; seven days after he was himself seized with fever, and had a narrow escape with life. The ship’s surgeon died of it, his mate recovered with difficulty, two surgeons of the town died of it, and two more in Cockermouth. The contagion spread widely among the inhabitants of Whitehaven, Cockermouth and Workington[197].

Lind showed to Howard in one of the wards of Haslar Hospital a number of sailors ill of the gaol fever; it had been brought on board their ship by a man who had been discharged from a prison in London, and it spread so much that the ship had to be laid up[198].

With the outbreak of the American War we begin to hear of still more disastrous epidemics of fever in the English fleets. Some instances from Robertson’s full collection must suffice[199]. The ‘Nonsuch’ left England in March, 1777, and fifty of her men were carried off by fever before December; in that month, the ‘Nonsuch,’ ‘Raisonable’ and ‘Somerset’ had each from 130[Pg 115] to 150 men on the sick list, chiefly fever in the ‘Somerset,’ and scurvy in the other two. In April, 1778, the ‘Venus,’ with a crew of 240, was at Rhode Island very sickly; the surgeon told Robertson that they had lost about fifty men of fever, which still continued to rage on board: they became sickly from being crowded with prisoners and cruising with them on board in bad weather. The ‘Somerset’ had buried 90 men of the fever since she left England, 70 of them being of the best seamen. On arriving at Spithead in October, 1779, Robertson found much fever in the Channel Fleet which had lately come in, especially in the ‘Canada,’ ‘Intrepid,’ ‘Shrewsbury,’ ‘London’ and ‘Namur,’ three or four of which were put past service, so much were they disabled by sickness. At Gibraltar Hospital from 12 January to 31 March, 1780, there were admitted 570 men from twenty-seven ships, of whom 57 died; of 110 sick from the ‘Ajax,’ 18 died; of 437 Spanish prisoners, 37 died. Next year, in May, 1781, at Gibraltar, the ‘Bellona’ had buried 27 men since she left England, and had 108 on the sick list. The ‘Cumberland’ had buried 15; of the ‘Marlborough’s’ men, 40 had died at the hospital. Robertson had to purchase at his own expense vegetable acids, fruit and vegetables for the sick.

[Pg 116]Fully a tenth part of the men raised were lost by sickness. Fever was the chief sickness, and as it happened rarely that more than one in ten cases of fever died, it will be easy to form an approximate estimate of the proportion of all the men raised for the ships that were on the sick list at one time or another with fever—nearly the whole, one might guess.

During the three last years of the period Haslar Hospital was constantly full of typhus fever. Admiral Keppel’s fleet arrived at Spithead on 26 October, 1778, and soon began to be infected with contagious fever; before the end of December, 3600 men had been sent to Haslar, which could make up at a pinch 1800 beds. But the great epidemic at Portsmouth was the next year, 1779, when the very large Channel Fleet under Sir Charles Hardy came in. During the month of September, 2500 men were received into hospital, and more than 1000 ill of fevers remained on board for want of room in the hospitals. In the last four months of 1779, 6064 sick were sent to Haslar, which had 2443 patients on 1 January, 1780. There was an additional hospital at Foston, holding 200, as well as two hospital ships holding 600. The infection was virulent during the winter, when Portsmouth was crowded with ships; and in the first five months of 1780, when 3751 cases of fever were admitted during the decline of the epidemic, one in eight died. The following shows how much fever preponderated at Haslar Hospital in 1780. In 8143 admissions on the medical side, the chief forms of sickness were as follows[201]:

[Pg 117]These experiences of fever in the ships of the Royal navy continued to the end of the 18th century. In Trotter’s time, as in Lind’s, receiving ships were a source of contagion to others, one ship of the kind, the ‘Cambridge’ having diffused fever among many ships of the Channel Fleet by men drafted from her[204].

Ship typhus was also an incident of the voyages of the East India Company’s ships, which nearly always carried troops. In the voyage of the ‘Talbot,’ 22 March—25 August, 1768, with 240 persons on board, “towards the end of July a fever of a very bad kind made its appearance, attended with delirium, low pulse, petechiae or livid vibices and hæmorrhages from the nose, of which one died and three or four escaped hard.” The sick were isolated, and the infection did not spread. Such outbreaks of typhus were not uncommon at sea, although the loss of life from them was small beside that from the fevers of Madagascar, Sumatra, Batavia and Bengal. The ship typhus usually began on board among the soldiers. The most notable point is that relapses were common, as Lind also observed at Haslar Hospital; some on board the ‘Lascelles’ in 1783 (150 attacks among 151 soldiers) had relapsed seven times. It does not appear, however, that the best class of merchantmen suffered greatly from fevers. Dr Clark, who compiled a report of the practice in fevers in the ships of the East India Company from 1770 to 1785, had reason to congratulate the Company on the general healthiness of their fleet:

[Pg 118]On the other hand, these English reports give incidentally the most unfavourable accounts of the Dutch East Indian ships. Three Dutch ships, then in Praya Bay, St Jago (Cape de Verde Islands), had buried 70 to 80 men each, and had some hundreds of sick on board. Another report says: “Before we left Table Bay several Dutch ships arrived, some of which had buried 80 people in the voyage from Holland. None lost less than 40 men. I am informed that some of their ships last year buried 200 men”—the causes of the sickness being overcrowding, filth, and the slowness of the voyages. One experience of the very worst kind happened to an English expedition consisting of the 100th regiment, the 98th regiment, the second battalion of the 42nd, and four additional companies. They had formed part of the force for the reduction of the Cape of Good Hope, whence they re-embarked for Bombay. During the voyage from Saldanha Bay a contagious fever and scurvy broke out among the troops, who were crowded and badly clothed; dead men were thrown overboard by dozens, and the regiments were reduced to a third of their original numbers. Six officers of the 100th regiment died, and an equal if not greater proportion of those of the 98th and 42nd.

The other chief occasion of ship typhus was the emigration to the American and West Indian colonies from Britain and Ireland. The Irish emigration was especially active from the beginning of the 18th century, owing to rack-renting and other causes. Madden[206] professed to know that one-third of the Irish who went to the West Indies (perhaps he should have included Carolina) perished either on the voyage or by diseases caught in the first weeks after landing; and as we know that typhus attended the Irish emigration in the 19th century, we may infer that the same was the cause of mortality in the 18th.

The trouble from ship-fever in the navy was so great all through the 18th century that many ingenious shifts were tried to overcome it. Towards the end of the century, the favourite device was fumigation with the vapour of mineral acids; one such plan, for which the Admiralty paid a good sum, ended in the burning of several ships to the water’s edge. An earlier plan was ventilation of the hold and ’tween decks by means of[Pg 119] Sutton’s pipes[207], which found a strong advocate in the Rev. Stephen Hales, of the Royal Society[208].

Twice in the course of a paper to that learned body[209] he asserts that the noxious, putrid, close, confined, pestilential air of ships’ holds and ’tween decks “has destroyed millions of mankind”; on the other hand, according to the testimony of a captain of the navy, Sutton’s pipes had kept his ship free from fever. Lind caps this with the case of H.M.S. ‘Sheerness,’ bound to the East Indies. She was fitted with Sutton’s pipes, the dietary being at the same time so arranged that the men had salt meat only once a week. After a very long passage of five months and some days she arrived at the Cape of Good Hope without having had one man sick. “As the use of Sutton’s pipes had been then newly introduced into the king’s ships, the captain was willing to ascribe part of such an uncommon healthfulness in so long a run to their beneficial effects; but it was soon discovered that, by the neglect of the carpenter, the cock of the pipes had been all this while kept shut[210].”

Ship-fever was at length got rid of by more homely and more radical means than scientific ingenuity. Lind had shown one root of the evil to lie in the pressing of men just out of gaol. Admiral Boscawen, by his unaided wits, discovered another means of checking it. He avoided the mixing of fresh hands with crews seasoned to their ships, unless when some evident utility or necessity of service made it proper; “and upon this principle he used to resist the solicitation of captains, when they requested to carry men from one ship to another when changing their command[211].” Towards the end of the 18th century many reforms were made in the naval service—in the dietary, in the allowance of soap, in keeping the bilges clean, in the use of iron and lead instead of timber; so that Blane dates from the year 1796 a new era in the health of the navy[212].

 [Pg 120]

The “Putrid Constitution” of Fevers in the middle third of the 18th Century.

Resuming the history of fevers among the people at large from the great typhus epidemic of 1741-42 to the end of the century, we find the conditions somewhat different in the earlier and later divisions of the period. The time of prosperity, when England exported large quantities of wheat in every year except two or three, is reckoned from 1715 to 1765; after the latter date England gradually ceased to be an exporting country, owing to various causes, including the increase of pasture farming and the growth of industrial populations in the northern counties. The year 1765 marks the beginning of what has been called the Industrial Revolution; and it is also an important point of time in the history of the fevers of the country, for it is in the generation after that we obtain all the best information on what may be called industrial typhus, in the writings of a group of physicians who were at once philanthropic and exact. But there was an earlier period of fever, which is somewhat difficult to the historian. It is perhaps the last period in which Sydenham’s language of “epidemic constitutions” seems to be appropriate, whether it be that the writers of the time were still under his influence, or because the prevalent maladies could not well be accounted for in any other way. The constitution in question was a “putrid” one. It coincided with the great outburst of putrid or gangrenous sore-throat, to be described elsewhere; and it included an extensive prevalence of fevers which were also called putrid or nervous, and sometimes called miliary. Fevers of the same kind, and with the same miliary rash, are described by earlier writers, such as Huxham. Perhaps the most correct view of the matter is to consider this type of fever as corresponding roughly to the middle third of the century, and as having been interrupted by the typhus epidemic of 1741-42, during a time of special distress. Besides the great outburst of putrid or malignant sore-throat, there was also a disastrous murrain of cattle for several years; and at Rouen there was a remarkable fever which some English writers of the time took to be the highest manifestation of the same “putrid” constitution that they discovered also in the English and Irish fevers.

Exactly covering the period of these fevers at Rouen, there were low putrid fevers in London, in Worcestershire, in Ireland, and among the English colonists in Barbados. It was certainly[Pg 122] not a mere fashion in medicine which produced the accounts of a similar fever, for these accounts came from places far apart and were independent of each other. Dr Fothergill, of Lombard Street, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine every month for five years a short account of the weather and prevalent diseases of London, beginning with April, 1751, and ending with December, 1755. He had the weekly bills of mortality before him, and he makes various comments upon them; but his accounts of prevalent diseases are from his own observation and by way of illustrating the bills. His first reference to a fever is under October, 1751: “A slow continual fever, with acute pain in the forehead: not many attacked, few mortally.” The year 1752 was remarkably free from fevers until November, when we read of a fatal fever which had rheumatic symptoms at first (as at Rouen in 1744), attacking the head later, with coma-vigil and a dark-coloured ichor on the tongue and lips. It continued into January and February, 1753, proving fatal to several. In the summer and autumn months there were fevers of the low, depressed kind, sometimes called “remittents,” with copious sweats, or “slow, remitting, dangerous fever,” or “slow, treacherous, remittent fever, too often fatal.” The references to it are most numerous in the months from November, 1753, corresponding to Le Cat’s Rouen narrative. It was slow and imperceptible in its approach, the sick often going about ill for a week before seeking advice; it was attended with profuse sweats which never relieved, and was fatal to many. It continued more or less through the summer, and from August, 1754, it is again prominent. In September, it was the most alarming form of disease, and was then commonly vehement in its access, with lassitude, and pain in the head and back; unrelieving sweats are again mentioned, with dry tongue, delirium, coma-vigil, and death about the 14th-15th day. Fothergill was at a loss to know whether he should order blood to be drawn, owing to the low depressed nature of the fever. In February, 1755, the fever is still “too much of the nature of those which prevailed in the preceding months to allow a repetition of bleeding.” In April it is called the petechial and miliary fever, the miliary eruption being of a white sort with a very noisome scent; the petechial spots turned livid, black and gangrenous; few patients escaped who had been sweated at the beginning. The fever was truly malignant, the patient restless from the outset, the sweats[Pg 123] weakening. Fothergill’s last entries of it are important, under the months of May and June, 1755. In May, 1755, the fevers were “for the most part allied to that dangerous remittent which has for some years past more or less prevailed in different places of this kingdom.” In June: “It does not appear that either in the hospitals or any part of the city a disease has broken out of so dangerous a nature as has been reported. The same kind of fever that has long continued in this city with some small variations in its type, still remains, but it is by no means more frequent than it has been in the preceding months, nor is it attended with more unfavourable symptoms.”

It is impossible to say how general over England this fever may have been in the years 1751-57. Our fullest accounts come from Worcestershire; but the putrid fever is heard of more widely. Thus a short Latin piece in the Gentleman’s Magazine, dated 14 April, 1755, is on the putrid fever lately epidemic, and not yet extinct, in some parts of the county of Somerset and adjoining places; its signs were contagiousness, pains of the head and loins, nausea and vomiting, diarrhoea, quick weak pulse, purple spots, delirium and coma[214]. Grainger, writing from Edinburgh in 1753, declares his motive for publishing an account of the anomalous fever of the Netherlands in 1746-48 to be that the same had lately been raging over almost the whole of Britain.

We have some particulars for Kidderminster, which can hardly have been exceptional for an industrial town, and according to the accounts were true also for villages and market towns near. Kidderminster was, in the year 1756, a town of about four thousand inhabitants, mostly hand-loom weavers of worsted and silk. There were no power-looms anywhere in England at that time; and the condition of the Kidderminster weavers’ houses was doubtless what that of the Tiverton community had been fifteen years before. Many of the weavers, we are told, are lodged in small nasty houses, for the most part crowded with looms and other utensils[215]. Many of these houses were built on a low flat of the river Stour, whence rose putrid[Pg 124] vapours after floods. Its situation had served to render the town specially unhealthy before, as in the epidemic of 1727-29[216].

The first notice by Dr Johnstone is of a low miliary fever from Midsummer 1752 to the end of the year. This was a comparatively mild affair, although it carried off several. But after Christmas it was succeeded by a fever which would then have been classed as of the putrid kind. The first great season was in 1753, it ceased in the fine years 1754-55, but came back in 1756 and 1757. It began with languor, lowness, flutterings, faintness, vague pains in the limbs, a low quick pulse, giddiness and slight sickness. Some had a propensity to loose stools and to profuse hurtful sweats; some bled at the nose, others coughed and spit blood; some had pain in the throat, and crimson-red tongue, the sweat and breath of the sick had a strong, offensive, putrid smell. In some of the worst cases livid petechiae, large livid blotches, and dark brown spots occurred over the trunk and limbs. The successful treatment was by mineral acids, bark, port wine, and vesication. “This malignant fever was very often (though not constantly) complicated with, and in general bore great analogy to the malignant sore-throat which at this time prevailed in many parts of England.” The fever which prevailed during that remarkable year (1753) was very evidently contagious, for whole families were either all together or one after another seized with it. One of the most distinctive symptoms was a tendency to trembling of the whole body, as well as leaping of the tendons at the wrists. In some the tonsils were beset with aphthous sloughs, and towards the decline there would be aphthae of the mouth, but symptomatic only, and not the dominant lesion as in the ulcerous sore-throat. About the 15th day the fever was generally at its height. The miliary eruptions were critical to the few that had them; the flat livid petechiae appeared at all times of the disorder. Johnstone then compares the fever with that described by Le Cat at Rouen in the winter of the same year; and although he had been unable to satisfy his curiosity by opening any body dead of the fever, he felt sure that these dreadful symptoms arose from[Pg 125] some affection of the stomach and small guts, at first erysipelatous, afterwards gangrenous, and at last truly sphacelous.

Johnstone’s statement that the putrid fever in Worcestershire in 1752-53 was often complicated with and bore great analogy to the malignant sore-throat is borne out by Huxham’s accounts for Plymouth during the same season:

The first years of this putrid or miliary fever were not seasons of scarcity, there having been no failure of the crops since 1741 (unless in Ireland, in the province of Ulster mostly, in 1744); on the contrary, many of the seasons had been unusually fine and abundant, the exports from England of wheat, barley, malt and rye in the three years 1748, 1749 and 1750 amounting to four million quarters. Prices were at the same time favourable to the poorer classes[218]. But there had been a destructive murrain for several years (30,000 cows are said to have died in Cheshire in 1751), and the harvest of 1756 was a failure.

To the month of February, 1756, the season had been very forward, but the early promise of spring was blighted by cold, a wet summer and autumn ensued, the fruit crop was ruined, and the corn harvest spoiled by long, heavy rains. A dearth, bread-riots, &c. ensued[219]; but it is to be noted that the revival of the dangerous malignant contagious fever began at Kidderminster as early as April, becoming much worse after harvest. “Many for weeks or months laboured under an uncommon depression of spirits, felt their strength abate, with great lassitude, and very often a great proneness to faint away.” As the summer advanced the fever became truly epidemic not only in Kidderminster but in many other parts of the West and North-west of England.

Frost in October checked it, and then measles of a malignant type had its turn among the children, the whooping-cough succeeding the measles. From November to Christmas the putrid fever, which chiefly affected persons from ten to fifty, and more women than men, returned with increased force. In fatal cases, the face was ghastly, sunken and livid (the facies Hippocratica), the patient sweated profusely, but seldom became cold till death was at hand. There was an abominable cadaverous stench in the breath, perspiration and stools. In these cases death took place from the 12th to the 14th day.

The intense and long frost of the opening months of 1757 nearly put a stop to the fever at Kidderminster.

Parliament was summoned to meet in December, 1756, on account of the dearth, which formed the topic of the Speech from the throne. The export of corn (which had reached a million quarters a year not long before) was prohibited, and the use of grain in distilling stopped for two months. The distress was more acute in 1757, and was enhanced by the greed of corn-dealers and millers, who used French bolting-mills to grind the mere husks of wheat, pease, rye and barley together into meal. Short, who practised at Sheffield, says that the fever in October and November, 1757, “was neither so rife nor fatal as in 1741[221].” It raged fiercely in several towns at a[Pg 127] distance, “where it went by the name of the miliary fever,” and was mostly among the poor, half-starved in the dearth of 1756-57. It is heard of again in the district of Cleveland in the winter of 1759-60, where it seems to have been mostly a disease of children complicated with sore-throat, and allied more to scarlet fever than to the putrid fever of adults[222]. But at Sunderland, near at hand, there was spotted fever at the same time, and in Newcastle there was dysentery.

The accounts of fever in Ireland in the same period as in England (see chapter II.) are not without value, as showing that the “putrid” or nervous type of fever, contrasting with the ordinary typhus of the country, had been remarked there also. Rutty and Sims describe, during a certain period, the symptoms of the low, putrid fever, sometimes with miliary eruptions, identifying it both by name and in character with the fever then prevalent in England. The most significant thing in Rutty’s annals is that there occurred in the midst of the low, putrid fever with miliary pustules in 1746, a more acute fever, ending after five or seven days in a critical sweat, and relapsing. The same fever, not very fatal, reappeared in 1748. Sims brings the history of the nervous or putrid or miliary fever in Ireland (Tyrone) continuously down to the year 1772, as elsewhere related. The remarkable phenomenon of tremors or shakings, which most witness to, was seen by him in perfection in the year 1771:

Perhaps the most surprising testimony to the existence of an “epidemic constitution” of slow, continued nervous fever comes from the island of Barbados. Hillary, who had kept a record of the prevalent diseases at Ripon, continued the same when he settled in Barbados in 1751[224]. There can be no doubt as to[Pg 128] the appearance of this fever in February 1753, its prevalence all over the island for eighteen months, and its disappearance in September 1754, when, as he writes, “It now totally disappeared and left the island, and, I think, has not been seen in it since” (1758). He gives the same account of it as the observers in England and Ireland, except that he does not describe miliary eruptions and describes jaundice in convalescent children. It was insidious in its onset (as in London), the patient often keeping afoot five or six days; the symptoms included pains in the head, vertigo, torpor, lassitude, vigil, delirium, faintings, partial sweats, involuntary evacuations, gulpings, tremors, twitchings, catchings, coma and convulsions. Recovery was marked by copious equable sweats and plentiful spitting. “This slow, nervous fever was certainly infectious, for I observed that many of those who visited, and most of them that attended the sick in their fever were infected by it, and got the disease, and especially those who constantly attended them and performed the necessary offices of the sick.” It was last heard of in the remoter parts of the island.

Miliary Fever.

It will have been observed in the foregoing accounts of the predominant fevers of the years (roughly) from 1750 to 1760 that there was often a miliary eruption, but that it was far from constant. The constant things were the lowness, depression, ill-smelling sweats, tremors of the whole body or of the wrist-tendons, and other nervous or ataxic symptoms. But we hear more of a miliary eruption in connexion with that than with any other period of fevers in the history; and this was the time when a controversy arose as to whether there was in reality a distinctive kind of fever marked by miliary eruption. Some of the school of Boerhaave contended that the phenomenon of miliary vesicles was due solely to the heating and sweating treatment of the alexipharmac physicians. De Haën and others answered that miliary fever was a natural form, independent of the mode of treatment. The Boerhaavian contention may be admitted as good for such miliary fevers as were described under that name in 1710 by Sir David Hamilton[225]; nearly the[Pg 129] whole of his sixteen cases appear to have been made miliary by treatment, in so far as they became miliary at all. What this physician did was to foretell the approach of miliary symptoms in various maladies (about one-half of the cases being of lying-in women, and the rest various), and then to prescribe Gascoign’s powder, Goa stone, Gutteta powder, Venice treacle or other diaphoretics, along with diluents and the application of blisters; the miliaria appeared about the breast, neck, and clefts of the fingers in due course (tenth to fourteenth day).

So far as his clinical cases are concerned, the late appearance of miliary vesicles, lasting a few days, is sufficiently explained by the powerful drenches administered; and it can hardly be doubted that much of what was called miliary fever was of that factitious kind. But even in Hamilton’s essay we find indications of a real miliary type of fever; thus he mentions a class of cases which look to be the same as those described by Johnstone, Rutty, Sims and others forty years after—cases with wakefulness, depression, tremblings of the tongue and hands, convulsive movements and delirium. He mentions also a complication of this with sore-throat in 1704, which destroyed many.

As to the association of miliary eruption with the low putrid fever so characteristic of the sixth decade of the 18th century, it is asserted by too many and in too various circumstances for any doubt as to its reality. There is nothing to show that the alexipharmac treatment was the one always used; and it is not certain that some in Ireland and elsewhere who had miliary eruption received any medical treatment at all. Again, miliary vesicles, not always with perspiration, were commonly found in the relapsing fever of Irish emigrants in London during the great famine of Ireland in 1846-47, by which time the powerful drenches of the alexipharmac treatment had been long disused[226]. The controversy as to the reality of miliary fever was one of the kind usual in medicine: certain physicians, of whom Hamilton in 1710 was an obvious instance, took up an untenable position; they were answered according to the weakness of their argument; and that has been held in later times to be an answer to all who alleged the existence of a type of fever marked by miliary eruptions. There can be no question as to a low, “putrid” kind of fever in which miliary eruptions were usual;[Pg 130] but offensive sweats were perhaps more usual, whence the name of putrid in a literal sense, different from the theoretical sense of Willis; more constant also were the starting of tendons, the tremors and shakings, together with very varied hysteric symptoms, from which the fevers received the name of nervous. Dr John Fordyce in his ‘History of a Miliary Fever’ (1758) really describes under that name the symptoms of the low, nervous, putrid fever, often attended with miliary vesicles, which had been the common type in England in the years immediately preceding, and was a common type for some time after, although less is heard of the miliary eruptions in the later history[227].

About the last quarter of the 18th century medical writers were inclined to drop the names of nervous and putrid as distinctive of certain fevers. Pringle, in his edition of 1775, says he had been careful to avoid the terms nervous, bilious, putrid and malignant, which conveyed either no clear idea or a false one. Armstrong, another army physician, writing in 1773, says: “Nervous, putrid, bilious, petechial or miliary, they are all of the malignant family; and in this great town [London] these are almost the only fevers that have for many years prevailed, and do so still, to the great destruction of mankind. For inflammatory fevers ... have for many years been remarkably rare[228].” Dr John Moore becomes sarcastic over the variety of names given to continued fever, some such generic name as Cullen’s “typhus,” then newly introduced, being what he desired[229].

Haygarth, writing of the Chester fevers in 1772, said that the miliary fever had been “supposed” endemic there for more than thirty years past, but he thought it probable that the eruption had generally, or always, been fabricated “by close, warm rooms, too many bed-cloaths, hot medicines and diet.” He had seen only one case in the epidemic that year, and he believed its rarity at that time was due to the treatment by fresh air and by[Pg 131] “such regimen and medicines as are cooling and check putrefaction[230].” We shall see later that Percival, for Manchester, contents himself with saying that miliary fevers, which were formerly very frequent in that town and neighbourhood, now [1772] rarely occur[231]. In Scotland as late as 1782 the type was still nervous or low, and hardly ever inflammatory[232].

Mortalities in London from fever and all causes.

It is singular to observe that in the five successive years in this period with lowest fever-deaths and deaths from all causes, the years 1757-61 England was at war on the Continent. A similar low fever-mortality corresponded with the wars under Marlborough and Wellington.

The era of agricultural prosperity in England, which had its only considerable interruptions in the years 1727-29 and 1740-42, may be said to have met with a more serious check from the bad harvest of 1756. There was a recurrence of agrarian troubles in 1764-67, partly through actual scarcity caused by the extreme drought of 1764, partly through the pulling down of cottages and the discouragement of country villages, which Goldsmith has pathetically described in his poem of the time. Short says that the country in 1765 was in general very healthy but for children’s diseases. “In some parts the putrid fever roamed about from place to place in the highest degree of putrefaction, so as several dead bodies were obliged to be buried the same day as they died.” The price of provisions was excessive, meal riots broke out, and the export of corn was[Pg 132] stopped, Parliament having been summoned for the occasion in November, 1766[233]. In 1769, at the time of the formation of Chatham’s ministry, the same train of incidents recurred,—bread-riots, flour-mills wrecked, corn and bread seized by the populace and sold at low prices, collisions with the military, the gaols full of prisoners[234]. The long period of cheapness, having lasted half a century, was coming to an end. Moralists and economists had much to say as to the meaning of the national distress which began to be felt in the sixties. Want of industry, want of frugality, want of sobriety, want of principle, said one, had brought trouble on the working class. “The tumults that have lately arisen in many counties of England are no other than the murmurs of the people, which have been heard for some years, bursting forth at last into riot and confusion.” The English, it seems, had returned to their old medieval taste for the best food they could get; they would not give up the finest bread, although the Irish lived on potatoes, and the French on turnips and cabbage: “The ploughman, the shepherd, the hedger and ditcher, all eat as white bread as is commonly made in London, which occasions a greater consumption of wheat.” Women must have tea and snuff, though children go naked and starved. Another writes: “The poorest people will have the finest or none.” The enclosures had made a want of tillage. “What must become of our poor, destitute of work for want of tillage?” The country had for the most part been sickly, labourers scarce, and the farmers not able to get their usual quantity threshed out. The profligacy of the poor, profane swearing, etc., are remarked upon[235].

In the last thirty years of the 18th century the accounts of[Pg 133] fever in England became more detailed as to its circumstances, and more numerically precise. I shall accordingly bring together all that I can find relevant to fever in London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Chester, and thereafter in those towns, such as Manchester, Leeds, and others in the North, which were specially touched in their public health by the movement known as the Industrial Revolution.

Typhus Fever in London, 1770-1800.

In the London bills of mortality the item of fevers diminishes steadily during the latter part of the 18th century, the deaths from all causes diminish, the births come nearer to the number of the deaths, and in three years of the last decade they exceed them. This statistical result is doubtless roughly correct; but the bills were becoming more and more inadequate to the whole metropolitan area; and even for the original parishes which they included they have not the same value for fever in the later period as they had for plague at their beginning[236]. On the other hand, from about the year 1770 we begin to have more exact medical accounts of fever in London, which are not indeed numerically exhaustive, but good as samples of what was going on. Whatever improvement there was in the prevalence of typhus fever touched the richer classes. The Paving Act of 1766 is credited with having improved the health of the City, and there were many new streets and squares being built in the west end that were, of course, free from typhus. It is to these desirable residential quarters that the eulogies of Sir John Pringle[237], Dr John Moore[238] and others apply. The slums of London were as yet unimproved, and but little known to the physicians. Lettsom, who was one of the first of his class to visit among the poor in their homes, has much to say of typhus fever; but he is emphatic that it was nearly all an infection of the poor. “In the airy parts of this city,” he writes in 1773, “and in large, open streets, fevers of a putrid tendency rarely[Pg 134] arise.... In my practice I have attentively observed that at least forty-eight out of fifty of these fevers have existed in narrow courts and alleys.” The same is remarked by Currie for Liverpool, by Clark for Newcastle, by Percival and Ferriar for Manchester, by Haygarth for Chester, and by Heysham for Carlisle.

The quarters of the rich had gradually become detached from those of the poor. I have shown this more especially for Chester, where the old walls made a clear division; but it was general in the second half of the 18th century[239].

Medical practice lay mostly among the richer classes; the physicians knew little of the state of health in the cellars and tenement-houses of large towns. Those physicians who did know how much typhus fever there was in these purlieus had to enter a caveat against the incredulity of the rest. Dr Currie of Liverpool, whose facts I shall give in their place, protested that he was not exaggerating; a protest the more necessary that a contemporary of his own, Mr Moss, a middle-class practitioner, who wrote a book specially on the medical aspects of Liverpool, declares that fever is “rare” in that city, while Currie was treating from his dispensary a steady average of three thousand cases of typhus every year. In the same years, in February, 1779, a physician to the army, Dr John Hunter, who had commenced practice in Mayfair, found on visiting in the homes of the poorer classes in the west of London cases of fever for which he had no other name than the gaol or hospital fever of his military experience; it was so much a novelty to him, apart from campaigns or transport ships, that he gave an account of his discovery of domestic typhus to the College of Physicians[240]. At length he found so many cases steadily winter after winter that he had them sent to the infirmary of the Marylebone Workhouse. The practitioners who knew most of the sicknesses of the poor were such as Robert Levett, Dr Samuel Johnson’s[Pg 135] dependant, who lived with the doctor in the house in Gough Square. Levett had been a waiter in a Paris coffee-house frequented by the medical fraternity, and had acquired a taste for and perhaps some knowledge of the healing art. He made his modest living by the small fees or articles of food and drink which his poor patients gave him. He had only to issue from the back of Gough Square by the courts and alleys behind Fleet Street, and he would find in the region between Chancery Lane and Shoe Lane hundreds of families seldom visited by a physician or by a qualified surgeon-apothecary. The good Levett was only one of a class. There had always been such humble medical attendants of the poor in London. An Act of the third year of Henry VIII. was directed against them at the instance of the privileged practitioners; but the regular faculty is said to have proved in the sequel both greedy and incompetent, and after thirty years there came another Act, couched in terms that the bluff king himself might have indited (31-32 Henry VIII.), which asserts those qualities of the profession in so many words, and establishes the right of any subject of the king to practise minor surgery and the medicine of simples upon his or her neighbours. That Act is still part of the law of England, and under it Levett exercised a statutory right, perhaps without knowing it[241]. There were many other regions of courts and alleys all round the City on both sides of the water, which must have been medically served by such as Levett, if served at all. It was there that typhus was found and at length clinically described by competent physicians, among the earliest of whom was Lettsom.

The General Dispensary in Aldersgate Street having been started in 1770 with one physician, Lettsom was chosen additional physician in 1773, and threw himself into the work with great zeal[242]. In the first twelvemonth he saw many cases of fever, as in the following table:

[Pg 136]

Lettsom’s practice in Fevers at the Aldersgate Dispensary.

The nervous, putrid and remittent fevers, belonging, to the same group, make up the bulk of the fevers. The hectic fevers were almost all of children. The fatal cases of fever were fourteen, the fatal cases in all diseases for the year having been forty-four. What these putrid, nervous and remittent fevers were, will now appear from some of Lettsom’s descriptions. Fevers with symptoms of putrescency were marked by nausea, bitter taste, and frequent vomiting, by laboured breathing and deep sighing, offensive breath, sweats offensive and sometimes tinged with blood, almost constant delirium, the tongue dry, the tongue, teeth and lips covered with black or brown tenacious foulness, thrush and ulceration in the mouth and throat, the urine with a dark sediment, the stools excessively nauseous and foetid, and blackish or bloody, the eyes horny or glassy, with the whites often tinged of a deep blood colour, spots on the skin like fleabites, or larger haemorrhagic vibices, bleeding from the gums, nose or old ulcers, hiccup near death, often a cough through the fever. Lettsom’s treatment consisted in good liquors, Peruvian bark, and above all fresh, or “cold” air: “When it is considered that putrid fevers originate in close unventilated places, the introduction of fresh air seems so natural a remedy that I have often admired its aid should have been so long neglected[243].” Accordingly he persuaded the poor people to open their windows, and dragged the sick out of doors as soon as it was safe to do so; the effects, he says, were wonderful. His fifty-one cases are most valuable illustrations of the perennial fever in the crowded parts of London:

The year 1773, to which these experiences in a small part of London relate, was one of high febrile mortality, according to the Bills. Two years after, Dr William Grant was moved to write an ‘Essay on the Pestilential Fever of Sydenham, commonly called Gaol, Hospital, Ship and Camp Fever[244],’ which, as he said in his preface, “I often see in this city: and though so common and fatal, appears not at present to be generally understood.” It was, he says, “an indigenous plant, frequent in this city, being produced by close confinement; but it often passes unnoticed, because unknown.” The deaths by “fever” in the London Bills were as follows until the end of the century:

Deaths from Fever and from all causes in London.

[Pg 138]There were higher figures in the years immediately before 1771, the years to which the generalities of Fordyce and Armstrong relate. There is a decline in the fever-mortality towards the end of the century; but it is just from the years 1799-1800 that we have an account by Willan of the prevalence and conditions of London typhus, than which nothing can well be imagined worse. The intermediate glimpses we get of typhus in London in the writings of Dr Hunter, physician, and of Dr James Sims, show that the disease was perennial.

Dr James Sims, who had seen much of Irish typhus in Tyrone in his earlier years, and had removed to London, wrote of typhus among the poor there in 1786, ten years before the more systematic and more circumstantial descriptions by Willan[246].

[Pg 139]This fever was exceedingly mortal, several medical men, he had reason to believe, falling sacrifices to it. Sims never saw the cases till the 7th or 8th day, when they were desipient, insensible, with pulse scarcely to be felt and not to be counted, all having petechiae. None had scarlet rash or sore-throat. They sank and died quietly; the strongest cordials did not produce the smallest effect, and blisters in many did not even raise the skin[247].

It is in the year 1796 that we begin to have the full and accurate records by Willan of the prevailing diseases of London month by month as he saw them at the Carey Street Dispensary, situated in the crowded quarter between Holborn and the Strand[248]. His first reference to typhus is as follows:

Willan says little more of fever in London until September, 1798, when these contagious malignant fevers became more numerous, both in the city and adjacent villages, than had been known for many years before; also the fever was more fatal than usual, one in five or six dying, whereas one in seven was formerly a very unfavourable death-rate, and one in twenty not unknown. Haemorrhages, aphthae, diarrhoea, starting of the tendons, picking the bedclothes, violent delirium, ending in deafness, stupor, hiccough and involuntary evacuations, were the usual accompaniments of this fever. In the corresponding months of 1799 he recurs to the symptoms of this “malignant contagious fever,” and depicts typhus as clearly as may be. In September, 1799, it was “attended with a dull pain of the head, great debility or sense of lassitude and pains referred to the bones, tremblings,[Pg 140] restlessness with slight delirium, a querulous tone of voice, a small and frequent pulse, heat of the skin, thirst and a fur upon the tongue, first of a dirty white colour, but turning in the latter stage of the disease to a yellowish brown. In this form the fever continued thirteen days without any dangerous symptoms, and then suddenly disappeared, leaving the patient, for some time after, languid and dispirited. All the individuals of a family were successively affected with the same train of symptoms; many of them so slightly as not to be much confined to their beds.” In October and November he describes the symptoms of the disease in a more dangerous form. By this fever, he was informed, some houses of the poor had been almost depopulated, the infection having extended to every inmate. “The rumour of a plague was totally devoid of foundation.”

He then describes the state of the dwellings where such fevers occurred—the unwashed bed-linen, the numbers in one bed, the rooms encumbered with furniture or utensils of trade, the want of light and air in the cellars and garrets and in the passages thereto, the excremental effluvia from the vault at the bottom of the staircase. It cannot be wondered at, he concludes, that contagious diseases should be thereby formed, and attain their highest degree of virulence; and he estimates that “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of labourers in and near London, heads of families and in the prime of life, perished annually from such fevers. He denies that his account is exaggerated, and appeals for the truth of it to medical practitioners whose “situation or humanity has led them to be acquainted with” the localities[249].

Typhus in Liverpool, Newcastle and Chester in the last quarter of the 18th century.

Liverpool, in the last quarter of the 18th century, came next in size to London, having a population (in 1790) of 56,000 to the capital’s estimated 800,000. According to a medical author,[Pg 141] whose experiences lay among the middle classes, it was everything that could be wished in the way of healthfulness and prosperity; but it had a dark side as well. About 7,000 of the people lived in cellars underground, and nearly 9,000 in back houses, in small confined courts with a narrow passage to the street. “Among the inhabitants of the cellars,” says Currie[250], “and of these back houses, the typhus is constantly present; and the number of persons under this disease that apply for medical assistance to the charitable institutions, the public will be astonished to hear, exceeds three thousand annually.... In sixteen years’ practice I have found the contagious fever of Liverpool remarkably uniform among the poor. Seldom extending itself in any considerable degree among the other classes of the community, it has been supposed that Liverpool was little subject to fever; but this will be shewn from authentic documents to be a great and pernicious error.” At the Dispensary in the year 1780 the cases of typhus averaged 160 per month, the numbers being as remarkably steady from month to month as from year to year. In the ten years from 1 January, 1787, to 31 December, 1796, 31,243 cases of fever were entered on the books of the Dispensary, an average of 3124 per annum[251].

Of 213,305 cases of all diseases at the Dispensary in seventeen years, 1780 to 1796, 48,367, nearly one-fourth, were labouring under typhus. Supposing that these were all the cases of typhus in Liverpool, and that 1 in 15 died, we should have some 150 deaths from typhus in a year. Supposing also that typhus was relatively as common at that time in London, it will follow that nearly all the deaths under “fever” in the bills of mortality might well have been from typhus fever; for London in its several densely populated out-parishes was the fever-quarter of Liverpool a dozen times over[252].

[Pg 142]The Newcastle Dispensary was opened in October, 1777, by the exertions of Dr John Clark, who was in correspondence with Lettsom in London[253]. Dr Clark had been in the East India Company’s service, and had seen much of ship-fever and of the fevers of the East. During a visit to his home in Roxburghshire in the summer of 1770, between his voyages, he attended several persons in continued fever. When he settled at Newcastle he saw the worst kinds of contagious fever, in workhouses and “in the sordid and crowded habitations of the indigent.” Putrid fever, or typhus, was by far the most common disease attended from the new dispensary, although less than at Liverpool, the operations of the charity being on a much smaller scale. It was seldom out of Newcastle a whole year; and in some years, as 1778, 1779, 1783, 1786 and 1787 it was unusually rife in particular districts, often attacking whole families. Scarlet fever was epidemic and very fatal in 1778 and 1779, while dysentery attacked great numbers of the poor in the autumns of 1783 and 1785. The following Table shows the principal diseases attended from the Dispensary during the first twenty-three months of its working, 1 Oct. 1777, to 1 Sept. 1779:

Newcastle Dispensary 1777-79.