1688 3196 139 22921
1689 3313 129 23502
1690 3350 203 21461
1691 3490 193 22691
1692 3205 161 20874
1693 3211 199 20959
1694 5036 423 24109
1695 3019 105 19047
1696 2775 102 18638
1697 3111 137 20292
1698 3343 274 20183
1699 3505 306 20795
1700 3675 189 19443
_Tables from Short’s Abstracts of Parish Registers._
Registers Registers with Deaths Births
Year examined excess of death in them in them
_Country Parishes._
1689 144 27 828 692
1690 146 17 532 324
1691 147 16 336 180
1692 147 10 207 146
1693 146 27 650 426
1694 148 18 465 348
1695 149 23 649 492
1696 150 19 503 344
1697 150 21 559 409
1698 152 12 397 289
1699 151 20 433 318
1700 160 29 890 739
_Market Towns._
1689 25 12 1965 1415
1693 25 5 417 338
1694 25 6 1307 681
1695 25 3 309 246
1696 26 4 1020 708
1697 26 2 109 80
1698 26 4 575 423
1699 26 7 1181 867
1700 27 4 726 587
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 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._
Week Spotted All
ending Fever fever deaths
April 24 90 15 427
May 1 77 10 369
8 89 9 413
15 80 5 395
22 101 3 428
29 72 8 430
June 5 112 12 469
12 113 12 434
19 113 11 430
26 99 14 396
July 3 94 11 423
17 86 10 445
24 115 13 507
31 84 13 484
Aug. 7 99 10 462
14 110 20 530
21 135 19 583
28 111 20 510
Sept. 5 115 16 505
12 112 12 462
18 98 9 504
25 106 4 490
Oct. 2 124 8 533
9 125 10 553
16 114 9 552
23 104 3 511
30 118 3 528
Nov. 6 70 3 439
10 89 7 453
13 106 2 471
20 117 13 538
27 79 6 456
Dec. 4 87 6 475
11 87 3 407
18 78 4 445
25 66 3 394
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 44_s._ 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 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:
Baptised. Buried.
1691 57 75
1694 34 55
1695 47 48
1697 35 65
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]:
“About thirty-seven years since [written in 1732], this fever raged
much in Bristol, so that I visited from twenty-five to thirty patients
a day for a considerable time, besides their poor children taken into
their workhouse, where I engaged myself, for the encouragement of so
good and charitable an undertaking, to find them physick and give them
advice at my own expense and trouble for the two first years. All
these poor children in general had this fever, yet no more than one of
them died of it of the whole number, which was near two hundred.”
--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 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 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].
“The fevers that reign at this time [it was towards the end of the
seven ill years] are for the most part quick and peracute, and cut off
in a few days persons of impure bodies. And as I have used this method
by vomiting and purging in many, and most successfully at this time,
so I have had lately considerable experience thereof in my own family:
wherein four of my children and ten servants had the fever, and
blessed be God, are all recovered, by repeated vomiting with
antimonial vomits and frequent purgings, except two servants, the one
having gotten a great stress at work, who bragging of his strength did
contend with his neighbour at the mowing of hay, and presently
sickened and died the sixth day, and whom I saw not till the day
before he died, and found him in such a condition that I could not
give him either vomit or purge: and the other was his neighbour who
strove with him, being a man of most impure and emaciate body, who had
endured want and stress before he came to my service, and who got not
all was necessary because he had not the occasion of due attendance,
all my servants being sick at the time[74].”
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 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]:
“In the year 1694, in the month of August, that crop got such a stroke
in one night by east mist or fog standing like mountains (and where it
remained longest and thickest the badder were the effects, which all
our old men, that had seen frost, blasting and mildewing, had never
seen the like) that it got little more good of the ground. In November
that winter many were smitten with wasting sore fluxes and strange
fevers (which carried many off the stage) of such a nature and manner
that all our old physicians had never seen the like and could make no
help; for all things that used to be proper remedies proved
destructive. And this was not to be imputed to bad unwholesome
victual; for severals who had plenty of old victual did send to
Glasgow for Irish meal, and yet were smitten with fluxes and fevers in
a more violent and infectious nature and manner than the poorest in
the land, whose names and places where they dwelt I could instance.
“These unheard-of manifold judgments continued seven years, not always
alike, but the seasons, summer and winter, so cold and barren, and the
wonted heat of the sun so much withholden, that it was discernible
upon the cattle, flying fowls and insects decaying, that seldom a fly
or gleg was to be seen. Our harvests not in the ordinary months, many
shearing in November and December, yea some in January and February;
the names of the places I can instruct. Many contracting their deaths,
and losing the use of their feet and hands, shearing and working
amongst it in frost and snow; and after all some of it standing still,
and rotting upon the ground, and much of it for little use either to
man or beast, and which had no taste or colour of meal. Meal became so
scarce that it was at two shillings a peck, and many could not get it.
“Through the long continuance of these manifold judgments deaths and
burials were so many and common that the living were wearied with
burying of the dead. I have seen corpses drawn in sleds. Many got
neither coffins nor winding-sheet.
“I was one of four who carried the corpse of a young woman a mile of
way; and when we came to the grave, an honest poor man came and said,
‘You must go and help me to bury my son, he is lien dead this two
days; otherwise I will be obliged to bury him in my own yard.’ We
went, and there were eight of us had two miles to carry the corpse of
that young man, many neighbours looking on us, but none to help us. I
was credibly informed, that in the North, two sisters on a Monday’s
morning were found carrying the corpse of their brother on a barrow
with bearing-ropes, resting themselves many times, and none offering
to help them.
“I have seen some walking about at sunsetting, and next day at six
o’clock in the summer morning found dead in their houses, without
making any stir at their death, their head lying upon their hand, with
as great a smell as if they had been four days dead; the mice or rats
having eaten a great part of their hands and arms.
“The nearer and sorer these plagues seized, the sadder were their
effects, that took away all natural and relative affections, so that
husbands had no sympathy with their wives, nor wives with their
husbands, parents with their children, nor children with their
parents. These and other things have made me to doubt if ever any of
Adam’s race were in a more deplorable condition, their bodies and
spirits more low, than many were in these years.”
In the parish of West Calder, 300 out of 900 “examinable” persons
wasted away.
Some facts and traditions of the Seven Ill Years were recorded nearly
a century after in the Statistical Account of Scotland. From the Kirk
Session records of the parish of Fordyce, Banffshire, it did not
appear “that any public measures were pursued for the supply of the
poor, nor anything uncommon done by the Session except towards the
end. The common distribution of the collections of the church amounted
only to about 1_s._ 2_d._ or 1_s._ 4_d._ weekly.” The Kirk Session
records bore witness to the numerous cases of immorality in the years
before the famine that had been dealt with ecclesiastically, and to
the entire and speedy cessation of such cases thereafter[78].
The account for the parish of Keithhall and Kinkell, Aberdeenshire,
says that “many died of want, in particular ten Highlanders in a
neighbouring parish, that of Kemnay; so that the Session got a bier
made to carry them to the grave, not being able to afford coffins for
such a number[79].” In the upland parish of Montquhitter, in the same
county, the dear years reduced the population by one half or more.
Until 1709 many farms were waste. Of sixteen families that resided on
the estate of Lettertie, thirteen were extinguished. The account of
this parish contains several stories of the distress, with the names
of individuals[80]. It is clear, however, that all the parishes of
Scotland were not equally distressed. The county of Moray and “some of
the best land along the east coast of Buchan and Formartine
[Aberdeenshire] abounded with seed and bread;” but transport to the
upland parishes was difficult[81].
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 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].
Dead of Dead of Dead of
Year Fever Spotted Fever all diseases
1701 2902 68 20,471
1702 2682 53 19,481
1703 3162 74 20,720
1704 3243 61 22,684
1705 3290 41 22,097
1706 2662 54 19,847
1707 2947 42 21,600
1708 2738 62 21,291
1709 3140 118 21,800
1710 4397 343 24,620
1711 3461 142 19,833
1712 3131 96 21,198
1713 3039 102 21,057
1714 4631 150 26,569
1715 3588 161 22,232
1716 3078 100 24,436
1717 2940 137 23,446
1718 3475 132 26,523
1719 3803 124 28,347
1720 3910 66 25,454
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 25_s._ 6_d._ 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:
_s._ _d._
1708 Lady-day 27 3
" Michaelmas 46 3
1709 Lady-day 57 6
" Michaelmas 81 9
1710 Lady-day 81 9
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.
The case is recorded by Sir David Hamilton[86]:
“About the 5th of October, 1709, the son of that worthy gentleman,
William Morison, esquire, was seized with a fever; at which time, and
for some weeks before, a malignant fever raged in London.” He had a
quick and weak pulse, great difficulty or hindrance of speech, and a
stupidity; “whereto were added tremors, and startings of the tendons,
a dry and blackish tongue, a high-coloured but transparent urine and
coming away for the most part involuntarily, and a hot and dry skin.”
Dr Grew was called in, and prescribed alexipharmac remedies (cordials,
sudorifics, etc.) “A few days after the patient’s skin was stained or
marked with red and purple spots, and especially upon his breast, legs
and thighs. These symptoms, although a little milder now and then,
prevailed for fourteen days; after that the spots vanished, and the
convulsive motions so increased that the young gentleman seemed ready
to sink under them for several days together.” He was treated with the
application of blisters, and with doses of bark. His strength and
flesh were so wasted that the hip whereon he lay was seized with a
gangrene. For ten or twelve days before his death, “he breathed and
perspired so offensive a smell that they were obliged to smoke his
chamber with perfumes; and even myself, whilst I inclined my body a
little too near him, was, by receiving his breath into my mouth,
seized all on a sudden with such a sickness and faintness that I was
obliged to take the air in the open fields, and returning thence to
drink plentifully of _mountain_ wine at dinner.” The examination after
death was made by the celebrated anatomist Dr Douglas. There was still
a heap of brown-coloured spots visible on the breast; “there was
nothing contained in the more conspicuous vessels of the abdomen but
grumes or clots of blackish blood, without any serum in the
interstices.” Hamilton adds: “We too seldom dissect the bodies of
those dying in fevers.”
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 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.
Mrs Simon, aged 20, had a burning fever, stifling of her breath,
frequent vomiting and looseness, foul tongue, loss of sleep,
restlessness, intermitting, low and irregular pulse. This terrible
fever disappeared on the fourth day, and she thought herself
recovered. But on the seventh day from her being taken ill the fever
returned, she was light-headed, did not know her relatives, and was
fevered in the highest degree. It looked like a malignant fever, but
there were no spots.
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.
Week Dead of Dead of Dead of Dead of
ending fever spotted fever smallpox all diseases
May 2 103 [illegible] 99 571
9 90 6 60 517
16 84 7 71 502
23 93 15 71 503
30 106 11 83 550
June 6 93 2 98 508
13 79 8 84 509
20 106 12 99 574
27 105 15 86 503
July 4 106 7 99 482
11 107 13 97 467
18 126 16 89 509
25 109 13 105 562
Aug. 1 91 12 79 444
8 92 11 72 463
15 98 10 58 459
22 105 10 63 463
29 111 16 71 495
Sept. 5 76 4 63 414
12[89] 107 12 57 520
19 115 9 83 548
26 81 11 46 456
Oct. 3 98 9 45 469
10 79 10 49 480
17 90 5 41 477
24 107 5 45 470
31 106 14 51 421
Nov. 7 71 6 55 425
14 92 2 41 390
21 70 4 25 345
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._
Ten-year
periods Marriages Baptisms Burials
1661-70 585 2086 2266
1671-80 537 2240 2387
1681-90 540 2595 2856
1691-1700 688 2221 2856
1701-10 942 3033 2613
1711-20 991 3304 2765
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.
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 33_s._ 9_d._ per quarter, in
1712, the peace next year sending it no lower than 30_s._ But at
Michaelmas, 1713, it rose with a bound to 56_s._ 11_d._, 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 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:
“They all lie upon straw, the better and the worse alike. The king’s
allowance is a groat a day for each man for meat, but they are almost
starved for want of some covering, though many persons are charitable
to the sick.” The winter was unusually severe, the snow lying “a yard
deep.” Many prisoners died in the Castle by “the severity of the
season,” many were carried off by “a very malignant fever.” On
February 16th Lady Otway writes again:--“So much sickness now in our
Castle that they dye in droves like rotten sheep, and be 4 or 5 in a
night throne into the Castle ditch ffor ther graves. The feavour and
sickness increaseth dayly, is begun to spread much into the citty, and
many of the guard solidyers is sick, it is thought by inffection. The
Lord preserve us ffrom plague and pestilence[94]!”
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:
“The country town delights me: the populousness, the ease, the gaiety,
and well-dressed everybody, amaze me. Canterbury, which on my setting
out I thought deplorable, is a paradise to Modena, Reggio, Parma, etc.
I had before discovered that there was nowhere but in England the
distinction of _middling people_. I perceive now that there is
peculiar to us _middling houses_; how snug they are[95]!”
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. 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.
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.
It began with rigors, nausea and bilious vomiting, followed by
alternate heats and chills, with great lassitude and a feeling of
heaviness: then thirst and pungent heat, a dry and brown tongue,
sometimes black. The patient slept little, did not sweat, and was
mostly delirious, or anxious and restless, tossing continually in bed.
About the 12th day it was not unusual for profuse and exhausting
diarrhœa to come on. In a favourable case the fever ended in a crisis
of sweating about the 16th day. Those who were of lax habit,
unhealthy, hysteric, or cachectic, were apt to have tremors, spasms
and delirium, while others were so prostrated as to have no control
over their evacuations, lying in a stupor and raving when roused out
of it. In these the fever would continue to the 20th day; in some few
it ended without a manifest crisis, and with a slow
convalescence[100].
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 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:
_London Mortalities from Fever, &c._
Year Fevers Spotted fevers Smallpox All causes
1710 4397 343 3138 24620
1714 4631 150 2810 26569
1718 3475 132 1884 26523
1719 3803 124 3229 28347
1720 3910 46 1442 25454
1721 3331 84 2375 26142
1722 3088 22 2167 25750
1723 3321 51 3271 29197
1724 3262 84 1227 25952
1725 3277 59 3188 25523
1726 4666 84 1569 29647
1727 4728 102 2379 28418
1728 4716 94 2105 27810
1729 5235 [The entry 2849 29722
1730 4011 ends.] 1914 26761
1731 3225 2640 25262
1732 2939 1197 23358
1733 3831 1370 29233
1734 3116 2688 26062
1735 2544 1594 23538
1736 3361 3014 27581
1737 4580 2084 27823
1738 3890 1590 25825
1739 3334 1690 25432
1740 4003 2725 30811
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._
Registers Registers with Deaths Births
Year examined excess of deaths in same in same
1716 30 8 1060 845
1717 30 9 1485 1290
1718 30 3 249 169
1719 30 6 1737 1320
1720 30 10 2186 1461
1721 33 9 1294 952
1722 33 11 1664 1345
1723 33 14 2532 2176
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:
_Country Parishes._
Registers Registers with Deaths Births
Year examined excess of deaths in same in same
1721 174 35 793 586
1722 175 35 1015 775
1723 174 63 2021 1583
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:
Year Fever deaths All deaths
1726 4666 29,647
1727 4728 28,418
1728 4716 27,810
1729 5335 29,722
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.
Week Fever All
ending deaths deaths
1726
Jan. 18 71 633
March 15 81 678
May 31 103 611
June 7 106 607
Aug. 30 102 711
Sept. 6 116 680
13 109 643
20 109 648
1727
Aug. 8 103 577
15 123 698
22 132 730
29 130 789
Sept. 5 150 764
12 134 795
19 165 798
26 163 715
Oct. 3 150 684
1728
Feb. 6 112 748
13 131 889
20 121 850
27 145 927
March 5 93 733
Aug. 27 138 525
Sept. 3 131 562
Dec. 10 122 734
1729
Sept. 9 109 676
Nov. 4 213 908[104]
11 267 993[104]
18 166 783
Dec. 9 132 779
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].
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:
“For several days a malignant fever has so near a resemblance to one
that is only hysterick, that many physicians and standers by, I am apt
to believe, mistake the first for the last, and look upon a great and
dangerous disease to be only the spleen, or a fit of the vapors, to
the great hazard of the patient[108].”
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]:
“The present fever, with a variation in some of its symptoms, has now
subsisted twelve years [or since 1718] not in England only, but all
over Europe [Manningham says it was peculiarly English]. Few or no
physicians suspected the reigning and popular disease to be a fever.
Vapours, a nervous disease, and such general appellations it had from
sundry physicians. Others, who discovered the fever, knew it was the
low or slow fever, first mentioned by Hippocrates.... The last were
represented as ignorant for calling the distemper a fever, and
affixing to it the name ‘low’ or ‘slow,’ a slow fever being, in their
adversaries’ opinion, altogether unheard of among physicians and never
recorded in their books. Nothing was more monstrous than calling this
distemper a fever, or confining persons afflicted with it to their
bed, and dieting them with broth, or other liquid food of good
nourishment, and what is easily concocted.... ‘You are not hot, you
are not dry; you are in good temper; and therefore you have no fever’
was the common language of the town.... They might have seen
physicians practising for a destroying distemper, and yet, after seven
years, they confess themselves ignorant of its very name.”
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:
“Thus, having gone on for six or seven days in a train of indolence,
they have been surprized on the seventh day, and have died on the
eighth lethargick or delirious, whereas, if they had taken due care,
the fever would have run its course in fifteen days or more.” It was
the remissions, or intermissions, he explains, that often misled
patients, by which he seems to mean the clear intervals between
relapses. “Others, wearied out with relapses, have hoped their
recovery would as certainly ensue as it had hitherto, and have
deferred asking advice until it was too late.” These relapses, he
thought, were brought on by venturing too soon into the air: “it is
too well known that the fever has been cured, and patients have soon,
after they have ventured into the air, relapsed and have again run the
same circle of ill symptoms, if not worse than before.” Bark failed
conspicuously in these “remittents:” “it is therefore incumbent on me
to examine into the reason of this _new phenomenon_. I call it _new_,”
he explains, because bark had hitherto succeeded. “Perhaps we may find
reason to lay some blame on the air for the frequent relapses....
Periodical comas have of late been common; so soon as the fit was
over, the drowsiness abated till the fit returned.”
Elsewhere he speaks of the frequent relapses as belonging to a
“quartan,” under which diagnosis bark had been tried. The fevers were
less apt to “relapse” when treated by mild cathartics. Another symptom
of this fever was jaundice: “If jaundice breaks forth on the fourth
day of a fever, it is much better than if it comes at the conclusion
of a fever.... Jaundices are now very common after the cure of these
fevers.”
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 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].
At the beginning patients feel merely languid or uneasy, with flying
pains, dryness of the lips and tongue but no thirst; in a day or two
they find themselves often giddy, dispirited and anxious without
apparent reason, and passing pale urine. They have transient fits of
chilliness, a low, quick and unequal pulse, sometimes cold clammy
sweats and risings in the throat. They go about until more violent
symptoms come on, simulating those of quotidian, tertian or quartan
fever; sometimes the malady simulates pleurisy. There may be attacks
of dyspnoea, nausea and haemorrhage; the menses in women are checked.
A loss of memory and a delirium occur at intervals for short periods.
The malady is very difficult to cure and too often becomes fatal in
the end. It will last thirty or forty days, unless it end fatally in
stupor or syncope. A form of mania is a consequence of it, where it
has been neglected or badly treated; “of late years this species of
madness has been more than ordinarily frequent.” All sorts were liable
to it, but mostly valetudinarians, delicate persons, and those in the
decline of life; the fatalities were “especially among the opulent
families of this great metropolis[114].”
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._
Registers No. with excess Deaths Births
Year examined of deaths in same in same
1727 33 19 3606 2441
1728 34 23 4972 2355
1729 36 27 6673 3494
1730 36 16 3445 2529
_Norwich._
Year Buried Baptized
1728 1417 774
1729 1731 843
_Country Parishes._
Registers With excess Burials Baptisms
Year examined of burials in same in same
1726 181 22 542 495
1727 180 55 1368 1091
1728 180 80 2429 1536
1729 178 62 2015 1442
1730 176 39 1302 1022
1731 175 24 700 614
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 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:
“Ancient and weak hysterical people had nervous twitchings and
catchings, and were comatous and delirious; some were very languid,
sick and faint, and had tremors; the young and robust, who had more
full pulses, were generally delirious, unless it was prevented or
taken off by proper evacuations and cooling medicines. I found
blistering to be of very great service in this fever, and the sick
were more relieved by it than ever I observed in any other fever
whatever. People of lax, weak constitutions were very low and faint,
and had frequent, profuse, partial sweatings, which most commonly were
cold and clammy.” Huxham also, at the other end of England, says that
in October and November, 1727, a slow nervous fever attacked not a
few; and under the date of January, 1728, he confirms the Yorkshire
experiences of the prevalence of angina.
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 4_s._ to 8_s._ per bushel[118]. Under the year 1727 Hillary
says:
“Many of the labouring and poor people, who used a low diet, and were
much exposed to the injuries and changes of the weather, died; many of
whom probably wanted the necessary assistance of diet and medicines.”
And after referring, under the winter of 1727-28, to the prevalence of
a fatal suffocative angina, which fell, by a kind of metastasis, on
the diaphragm or pleura, and sometimes on the peritoneum, he proceeds
(p. 16):--
“Nor did any other method, which art could afford, relieve them:
insomuch that many of the little country towns and villages were
almost stripped of their poor people, not only in the country adjacent
to Ripon, but all over the northern parts of the kingdom: indeed I had
no certain account of what distempers those who were at a distance
died of, but suppose they were the same as those which I have
mentioned, which were nearer to us. Bleeding, pectorals with
volatiles, and antiphlogistic diluters and blistering, were the most
successful. I observed that very few of the richer people, who used a
more generous way of living, and were not exposed to the inclemencies
of the weather, were seized with any of these diseases at this
time.... The quartans were very subject to turn into quotidians, and
sometimes to continual, in which the sick were frequently delirious.”
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 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:
“I happened to live in Gloucestershire in the years 1728 and 1729,
when a very fatal epidemical fever raged to such a degree as to sweep
off whole families, nay almost whole villages. I was called to several
houses where eight or nine persons were down at a time; and yet did
not so much as lose one patient where I was concerned[119].”
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.
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 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.
“The sick had generally a low pulse on the first two or three days,
with great anxiety and uneasiness, and thin, crude urine. Delirium
began about the fourth day, and continued until the fever went off on
the seventh day. Sometimes the disease was lengthened to the
fourteenth day. The approach of the delirium could always be foretold
by the urine becoming more limpid, and without sediment.... A large
plentiful sweat was the crisis in some. Others were exposed to
relapses, which were very frequent, and rather more dangerous than the
former fever[125].”
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 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].
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 31_s._ 6_d._ per
quarter, and it rose 10_s._ 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 56_s._ 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. 10_s._ 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 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:
“The general poverty which has of late prevailed over a great part of
this nation, and particularly amongst the woollen manufacturers in the
west, where the fever has raged and still continues to rage with the
greatest violence, affords but too great reason to believe that this
has been one principal source of the disease[131].”
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 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 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._
Week All
ending Fever causes
1741
March 10 123 660
17 103 564
24 112 624
31 105 573
April 7 123 670
14 128 687
21 89 580
28 123 622
May 5 104 495
12 141 587
19 129 573
26 153 600
June 2 138 512
9 138 483
16 115 536
23 127 494
30 154 513
July 7 149 523
14 162 551
21 130 485
28 151 621
Aug. 4 128 512
11 142 541
18 172 636
25 192 665
Sept. 1 171 675
8 190 691
15 182 760
22 199 748
29 189 733
Oct. 6 207 784
13 192 787
20 232 793
27 234 850
Nov. 3 250 835
10 228 772
17 182 670
24 214 806
Dec. 1 224 768
8 203 748
15 191 761
22 179 775
29 180 702
1742
Jan. 5 221 893
12 184 760
19 151 724
Feb. 2 132 675
9 103 533
16 108 675
25 103 641
_Effects of the Epidemic of 1741-42 on Provincial Towns. (Short’s
Abstracts of Parish Registers.)_
With burials
Registers more than Baptisms in Burials in
Year examined baptisms the same the same
1740 27 6 1409 1940
1741 27 14 3787 6205
1742 26 6 1721 3345
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]
1740 1741
All causes 1237 1611
---- ----
Consumption 278 349
Fever 161 304
Flux 3 36
Smallpox 274 206
Measles 100 112
Chincough 26 101
Convulsions 22 16
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].
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:
“We have with concern observed for some years past the fatal effects
of the frequent use of several sorts of distilled spirituous liquor
upon great numbers of both sexes, rendering them diseased, not fit for
business, poor, a burthen to themselves and neighbours, and too often
the cause of weak, feeble and distempered children, who must be,
instead of an advantage and strength, a charge to their country[144].”
“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 20_s._ 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:
“The perspiration of a man is about 1/34 of an inch in 24 hours,
consequently one inch in 34 days. The surface of the skin of a
middle-sized man is about 15 square feet; consequently the surface of
the skin of 2904 such men would cover an acre of ground, and the
perspir’d matter would cover an acre of ground 1 inch deep in 34 days,
which, rarefi’d into air, would make over that acre an atmosphere of
the steams of their bodies near 71 foot high.” This, he explains,
would turn pestiferous unless carried away by the wind; “from whence
it may be inferred that the very first consideration in building of
cities is to make them open, airy, and well perflated[146].”
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]. 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:
“He was the inventor of this new method of building by casting of
ground into streets and small houses, and to augment their number with
as little front as possible, and selling the ground to workmen by so
much per foot front, and what he could not sell build himself. This
has made ground-rents high for the sake of mortgaging; and others,
following his steps, have refined and improved upon it, and made a
superfoetation of houses about London[150].”
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, 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].