Medicine of Paris on Inoculation in Scotland, 1765. Reprinted in his
_Works_. Edin. 1781, p. 485. He does not give ages, but an inspection of
the burial registers is said to show that they were nearly all under five.
[1002] _Gent. Magaz._ 1742, p. 704. Blomefield gives 1710 and 1731 as
great smallpox years in Norwich.
[1003] _Ibid._ 1747, p. 623. The population of Northampton in 1746 was
5136. Price, _Revers. Payments_. 4th ed. I. 353.
[1004] Part of the account extracted from the parish registers by the Rev.
Samuel Partridge, F.S.A., vicar of Boston, and sent to Dr George Pearson,
who published it in the _Report of the Vaccine Pock Institution for
1800-1802_. London, 1803, p. 100.
[1005] J. C. M’Vail, M.D. in _Proc. Philos. Soc. Glasgow_, XIII. 1882, p.
381, from a MS. register kept by the session clerk of Kilmarnock, now in
the General Register House, Edinburgh. The baptisms and burials have not
been extended from the MS. for more years than the table shows.
[1006] _Statist. Acct. of Scotland._
[1007] _Sketch of a Plan, &c._ 1793, pp. 33-34.
[1008] The following is the Ackworth bill given by Price, _Phil. Trans._
LXV. 443.
1747-57 1757-67
Christened 127 212
Buried 107 156
----------------------------
Consumption 23 38
Dropsy 5 3
Fevers 35 23
Infancy 13 13
Old age 24 30
Smallpox 1 13
Chincough -- 2
Convulsions -- 6
Dysentery -- 2
Measles -- 2
Sundries 6 24
----------------------------
Total deaths
in ten years 107 156
[1009] The following are some examples of rural fecundity and health:
Middleton, near Manchester, 1763-72, births 1560, deaths 993, average of
4·75 children to a marriage. Tattenhall, near Chester, 1764-73, births
280, deaths 130; Waverton, same county and years, births 193, deaths 84.
Stoke Damerel (now the dockyard near Plymouth), in 1733 (in part an
influenza-year), births 122, deaths 62, population 3361. Landward
townships of Manchester in 1772, births 401, deaths 246. Darwen, in
1774-80, births 508, deaths 233, population 1850. From Papers in _Phil.
Trans._ by Percival and others.
[1010] _Statist. Acct. of Scot._ I. 155.
[1011] Hoare’s _Wiltshire_, VI. 521. There had been a general inoculation
to the number of 422, from 13 August, 1751, to February, 1752, just before
the epidemic. Brown to Watson, in _Phil. Trans._ XLVII. 570.
[1012] Huxham, _Ulcerous Sore-throat_, 1757.
[1013] _Gent. Magaz._ 1751, Supplement, p. 577. See also June, 1751, p.
244, and letter of “Devoniensis,” _ibid._ 1752, p. 159. The subject had
been raised by Corbyn Morris in his _Observations on the past growth and
present state of London_, and was discussed, from an actuary’s point of
view, by Dodson in _Phil. Trans._ XLVII. (Jan. 1752), p. 333.
[1014] The weekly average deaths for eight weeks of September and October
is 30·5 from two to five years and 11·1 from five to ten, which are about
half the average at each age period during the maximum prevalence of
smallpox.
[1015] W. Black, M.D. (_Observations Medical and Political on the
Smallpox, etc._ London, 1781, p. 100) says: “I am induced by various
considerations to believe that whatever share of smallpox mortality takes
place in London amongst persons turned of twenty years of age, is almost
solely confined to the new annual settlers or recruits, who are necessary
to repair the waste of London, and the majority of whom arrive in the
capital from twenty to forty years of age.”
[1016] Maddox, bishop of Worcester, preaching a sermon in 1752 for the
Smallpox and Inoculation Charity, enforced his pleading by relating the
recent case of “a poor man sick of this distemper, of which his wife lay
dead in the same room, with four children around her catching the dreadful
infection, but destitute of all relief, till they found _some_ in that too
narrow building which now importunately begs your compassionate bounty to
enlarge its dimensions.”
[1017] The _Gent. Magaz._ Sept. 1752, p. 402, contains a long letter to
refute the very prevailing notion among many people that there is very
little occasion for doctors and apothecaries in smallpox, but that a good
nurse is all the assistance that is usually wanted. “Whence this notion
took its rise I cannot conceive, unless it was from the disease being
visible, so that every one who has been at all used to it knows it when
they see it.”
[1018] This was an argument used in the first writings on Inoculation, so
as to prove the real hazard of dying by the natural smallpox. Thus,
Maitland in his _Vindication_ of 1722, which Arbuthnot is said to have had
a hand in, deducts a quarter of the annual London deaths before he begins
to estimate the ratio of smallpox among them, for the reason that eight
out of nine infants who die in their first year are “non-entities” _quâ_
smallpox, other causes of death having had the priority (p. 19). Jurin
used the same argument for the same purpose in his _Letter to Caleb
Cotesworth, M.D._, 1723, p. 11: “It is notorious that great numbers,
especially of young children, die of other diseases without ever having
the smallpox”; and again, “very young children, or at most not above one
or two years of age,” including the stillborn, abortives and overlaid,
chrisoms and infants, and those dead of convulsions. “It is true, indeed,
that in all probability some small part of these must have gone through
the smallpox, and therefore ought not to be deducted out of the account”;
but he does deduct 386 in every 1000 London deaths before he estimates the
ratio of smallpox deaths, which so comes out 2 in 17.
[1019] Percival, _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, V. 1776, p. 287; population in
_Phil. Trans._ LXIV. 54.
[1020] Haygarth, _Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox_, 1784.
[1021] Haygarth, _Sketch of a plan to exterminate the Natural Smallpox_.
Lond. 1793, p. 139.
[1022] John Heysham, M.D. “An Abridgement of Observations on the Bills of
Mortality in Carlisle, 1779-1787,” in Hutchinson’s _History of
Cumberland_. 2 vols. Carlisle, 1794, and separate reprint, Carlisle, 1797;
also reprinted in Appendix to Joshua Milne’s _Treatise on the Valuation of
Annuities_. London, 1815, pp. 733-752.
[1023] See Loveday’s _Diary of a Tour_, 1732, p. 120.
[1024] _Gent. Magaz._ 1755, p. 595. In a parish near Glasgow, Eaglesham,
eighty children are said to have died of smallpox in 1713. Chambers,
_Domest. Annals_, III. 387.
[1025] Robert Watt, M.D., _Treatise on the History, Nature and Treatment
of Chincough ... to which is subjoined an Inquiry into the relative
mortality of the Principal Diseases of Children, and the Numbers who have
died under ten years of age in Glasgow during the last thirty years_.
Glasgow, 1813.
[1026] This high mortality was probably caused by the epidemic agues of
1780, which specially affected Lincolnshire.
[1027] In 1802 the smallpox epidemic recurred, with 33 deaths. In 1801
there was one death.
[1028] Barker and Cheyne, u. s.
[1029] James Sims, M.D., _Observations on Epidemic Disorders_. London,
1773.
[1030] _Two papers on Fever and Infection_, 1763, p. 112.
[1031] _Medicina Nautica._
[1032] Haygarth, _Sketch of a Plan, &c._, 1793, p. 32.
[1033] Gaol at Bury St Edmunds: In the winter of 1773, five died of the
smallpox. No apothecary then. Leicester County Gaol: In 1774 three debtors
and one felon died of the smallpox. “Of that disease, I was informed, few
ever recover in this gaol.” Oxford Castle: In 1773 eleven died of the
smallpox. In 1774 that distemper still in the gaol. In 1775 one debtor
died of it in May, three debtors and a petty offender in June; three
recovered. No infirmary, no straw to lie on. _State of the Prisons._
[1034] I append Haygarth’s full table of the Chester smallpox epidemic,
1774:
Recovd. from Died of Not had
Parish Families Persons smallpox smallpox smallpox
{St Oswald 924 4027 321 40 350
Suburbs {St John 774 3187 284 52 218
{St Mary 583 2392 240 45 205
{Trinity 330 1605 127 24 97
Old {St Peter 193 920 52 6 39
Parishes{St Bridget 154 623 52 6 35
{St Martin 154 611 47 18 35
{St Michael 135 575 15 2 31
{St Olave 134 536 42 8 43
{Cathedral 47 237 3 1 7
---- ---- ---- --- ----
3428 14713 1183 202 1060
[1035] Isaac Massey, _Remarks on Dr Jurin’s last yearly Account of the
Success of Inoculation_. Lond. 1727, p. 6. Huxham held that children might
be “prepared” for the natural smallpox, as it was then the custom to
prepare them for the inoculated disease, so that few of them need have it
severely: “I am persuaded, if persons regularly prepared were to receive
the variolous contagion in a natural way, far the greater part would have
them in a mild manner.” _On Fevers._ 2nd ed. 1750, p. 133.
[1036] C. Deering, M.D., _Account of an improved Method of treating the
Smallpocks_. Nottingham, 1737.
[1037] John Lamport alias Lampard, u. s.
[1038] _Obs. on Ship Fever, &c._ New ed. Lond. 1789, p. 448.
[1039] Thomas Phillips, “Journal of a Voyage,” &c. in Churchill’s
_Collection of Voyages_, VI. 173.
[1040] Berkeley’s claim for tar-water in smallpox was a double one, as a
preventive or modifier, and as a cure. Of the former he says: “Another
reason which recommends tar-water, particularly to infants and children,
is the great security it brings against the smallpox to those that drink
it, who are observed, either never to take that distemper, or to have it
in the gentlest manner.” _Further Thoughts on Tar-water_, 1752. In his
_Second Letter to Thomas Prior, Esq._ 1746 (in _Works_. 4 vols. Oxford,
1871, III. 476) he gives the famous case of curing by it:--“the wonderful
fact attested by a solemn affidavit of Captain Drape at Liverpool, whereby
it appears that, of 170 negroes seized at once by the smallpox on the
coast of Guinea one only died, who refused to drink tar-water; and the
remaining 169 all recovered, by drinking it, without any other medicine,
notwithstanding the heat of the climate and the incommodities of the
vessel. A fact so well vouched must, with all unbiassed men, outweigh,
&c.”
[1041] Prince, _Gent. Magaz._ Sept. 1753, p. 414.
[1042] Walter Lynn, u. s. 1715, _ad init._
[1043] _Reports, &c._ 1819.
[1044] Whytt, _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, II. (1762), p. 187.
[1045] Cleghorn, _Diseases of Minorca_. London (under the years).
[1046] Hillary, _Changes of the Air, and Epidemical Diseases of Barbados_.
[1047] Muret, _Mém. par la Société Économique de Berne_, 1766. “Population
dans le pays de Vaud”: p. 102, “J’ai vu à Veney, la petite vérole être
générale dans toute la ville, des centaines d’enfans attaqués de cette
maladie, et qu’à peine il en mouroit sept ou huit.”
[1048] _Gent. Magaz._ 1753, p. 114. Letter from Sam. Pegge, rector, 17
Feb. 1753.
[1049] Haygarth, _Phil. Trans._ LXV. 87.
[1050] Morton, _Pyreologia_, II. 338: “Et quidem omnes haereditario quasi
jure benignis istis variolis tentabantur, quae (Deo favente) eventum
secundum habuerunt; nunquam enim quemquam meâ vel conjugis meae stirpe
ortum hoc morbo periisse memini.” The case of hereditary tendency to fatal
smallpox is No. 53, p. 470: “Domina Theodosia Tytherleigh, virgo elegans
ac formosa, stirpe celeberrima (sed cui hic morbus jure quasi haereditario
funestus esse solebat)” &c. She died in a late stage of the disease.
[1051] _Cal. Coke MSS._ (Hist. MSS. Commis.) II. 429.
[1052] Rutty, _Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons, and
prevailing Diseases in Dublin during forty years_. London, 1770, under the
dates.
[1053] Short (_Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind
in England, &c._ Lond. 1767) has found somewhere a statement that in 1717
there was “a most fatal continual fever in the West of Scotland, in
January and February, and not less fatal confluent smallpox in March and
April.”
[1054] _Lond. Med. Journ._ VII. 163.
[1055] W. Watson, in _Medical Observations and Inquiries by a Society of
Physicians in London_, IV. (1771), p. 153. Whether the epidemic that
preceded the smallpox was measles or scarlatina is a question that was
raised by Willan, and is referred to in the chapter on “Scarlatina and
Diphtheria.”
[1056] _Annals of the Lords of Warrington and Bewsey from 1587._ By W.
Beamont. Manchester, 1873, p. xix.
[1057] John Aikin, M.D., _Descriptions of the Country from thirty to forty
Miles around Manchester_. London, 1795, p. 302.
[1058] Taken out of the register by Aikin at the request of Dr Richard
Price, and published by the latter in the 4th ed. of his _Obs. on
Reversionary Payments_. Lond. 1783, II. 5, 100.
[1059] Arthur Young, _Six Months Tour through the North of England_. 4
vols. London, 1770-71, III. 163.
[1060] Percival, _Phil. Trans._ LXV. 328.
[1061] Beamont, u. s. p. 116-17.
[1062] Ferriar, _Med. Obs. and Reflections_.
[1063] Price, _Reversionary Payments_. 4th ed. II.
[1064] Aikin, _Phil. Trans._ LXIV. (1774), p. 438; Haygarth, _ibid._
LXVIII. 131.
[1065] “Almost ended at the winter solstice, only 19 remaining ill in
January, 1775.”
[1066] Percival, for Warrington, _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, V. (1776), p.
272 (information from Arkin); Haygarth, for Chester, _Phil. Trans._
LXVIII. 150. Haygarth (_Sketch of a Plan, &c._ p. 141) gives the following
table of the smallpox deaths and the deaths from all causes at several
ages of children up to ten years at Chester from 1772 to 1777 inclusive:
Under one 1-2 2-3 3-5 5-10 Total
Smallpox deaths 91 75 83 86 34 369
All other deaths 392 155 68 68 53 736
[1067] _Sketch of a plan, &c._ p. 31.
[1068] Heysham, _Obs. on Bills of Mortality in Carlisle_, 1779-1787.
Carlisle, 1797. Reprinted from App. Vol. II. of Hutchinson’s _Cumberland_.
[1069] _Lucas, Lond. Med. Journ._ X. 260: “The number of those who were
still uninfected was found on a survey to be 700.”
[1070] Dr Henry, of Manchester, to Haygarth, 20 March, 1789, in the
latter’s _Sketch of a Plan, &c._ p. 369: “In large and populous places
such as Manchester, the smallpox almost always exists in some parts of the
town. I have known it strongly epidemic in one part without any appearance
of it in others.... At present it is prevalent and fatal in the outskirts,
but very rarely occurs in the interior parts of the town.”
[1071] “Most of them [Jenner’s colleagues] had met with cases in which
those who were supposed to have had cowpox had subsequently been affected
with smallpox.” Baron, _Life of Jenner_, I. 48.
[1072] Haygarth to Worthington, 15 April, 1794, in Baron’s _Life of
Jenner_, I. 134.
[1073] See the cases and remarks by John Hunter, Sir W. Watson, Lettsom
and others.
[1074] Joseph Adams, _Observations on Morbid Poisons, Phagedaena and
Cancer_. 1st ed. Lond. 1795. Preface, 31 March.
[1075] I have collected all the scattered references in Jenner’s writings
to cowpox in the cow or in infected milkers in my _Natural History of
Cowpox and Vaccinal Syphilis_. London, 1887, pp. 53-57.
[1076] G. Pearson, _Inquiry concerning the History of Cowpox_. Lond. 1798.
[1077] Beddoes’ _Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge_.
Bristol, 1799, p. 387.
[1078] See my _Natural History of Cowpox, &c._ u. s. 1887. The most
systematic descriptions, both for cows and milkers, are by Ceely, in
_Trans. Provinc. Med. and Surg. Assocn._ VIII. (1840) and X. (1842).
Professor E. M. Crookshank has reproduced these valuable memoirs, with the
coloured plates, in his _History and Pathology of Vaccination_. 2 vols.
London, 1889. The plates are in vol. I., the memoirs in vol. II.
Crookshank’s volumes, which are a convenient repertory of the more
important earlier writings on cowpox, contain also the author’s original
observations (with plates), of cowpox in Wiltshire in 1887-88.
[1079] In my essay of 1887 (u. s.) I maintained, as an original opinion,
that the true affinity of cowpox was to the great pox of man, and that the
occasional cases of so-called vaccinal syphilis were not due to the
contamination of cowpox with venereal virus but to inherent (although
mostly latent) properties of the cowpox virus itself. This opinion was at
first received with incredulity, but is now looked upon with more favour.
See Hutchinson, _Archives of Surgery_, Oct. 1889, and Jan. 1891, p. 215.
The concessions hitherto made are only for cases that have arisen since my
book was published, such as the case at the Leeds Infirmary in 1889. I
believe that my explanation of vaccinal “syphilis” will at length be
accepted for all cases, past or future.
[1080] _An Inquiry, &c._ 1798. “Remarks on the term Variolae Vaccinae.”
[1081] That Dr Jenner foresaw this line of proof, and dismissed it as
irrelevant, is made clear by G. C. Jenner, _Monthly Magazine_, 1799, p.
671, in reply to Dr Turton, of Swansea: “It is possible that variolous
virus inserted into the nipples of a cow, might produce inflammation and
suppuration, and that matter from such a source might produce some local
affection on the human subject by inoculation. But all this tends only to
show, what was well known before, that virus taken from one ulcer is
capable of producing another by its being inserted into any other part of
the body.”
[1082] Jenner, _Further Observations on the Variolae Vaccinae_, 1799.
[1083] Thornton, in Beddoes’ _Contributions to Physical and Medical
Knowledge_. Bristol, 1799.
[1084] Hughes, _Med. and Phys. Journ._ I. (1799), p. 318. Many other
tests, English and foreign, are detailed in my book, _Jenner and
Vaccination_. London, 1889, for which see the Index under “test.”
[1085] Woodville tabulated 511 cases of applicants for inoculation at the
hospital in whom cowpox matter was used, giving “the number of pustules”
opposite the name of each; 90 had from a thousand to a hundred pustules,
215 had less than one hundred. William Woodville, M.D., _Reports of a
Series of Inoculations for the Variolae Vaccinae or Cowpox; with remarks
on this disease considered as a substitute for the Smallpox_. London,
1799. In a subsequent letter (_Med. Phys. Journ._ V., Dec. 1800), he thus
explained the occurrence of smallpox among those recently inoculated with
cowpox: “If a person who has been exposed to the contagion of smallpox for
four or five days be then inoculated for this disease, the inoculation
prevents the effects of the contagion, and the _inoculated_ smallpox is
produced. But if the vaccine inoculation be employed in a case thus
circumstanced, the smallpox is not prevented, although the tumour produced
by the cowpox inoculation advance to maturation. It was not before the
commencement of the present year [1800], that I ascertained that the
cowpox had not the power of superseding the smallpox. For, though from the
first trials that I made of the new inoculation it appeared that these
diseases, as produced in the same subject from inoculation, did not
interrupt the progress of each other; yet as the casual does not act in
the same manner as the inoculated smallpox, and may be anticipated by the
latter, I thought it still probable that the cowpock infection might have
a similar effect. Numerous facts have, however, proved this opinion to be
unfounded, and that the variolous effluvia, even after the vaccine
inoculation has made a considerable progress, have in several instances
occasioned an eruption resembling that of smallpox.”
[1086] _European Magazine_, XLIII. 137.
[1087] Bateman, u. s. 1819, Aug.-Nov. 1807: “In a court adjoining Shoe
Lane, in the course of one month, twenty-eight persons had died of
smallpox.” Autumn, 1812: “In one small court in Shoe Lane, seventeen have
lately been cut off by this variolous plague.” Also in the summer of 1812,
“perhaps universally through the metropolis.”
[1088] Extracted from the Annual Reports of the Dispensary.
[1089] Heysham to Joshua Milne, in the latter’s _Treatise on the Valuation
of Annuities_. London, 1815. App. p. 755.
[1090] Cross, 1819, u. i. p. 2.
[1091] Most of these were brought to light by inquiries upon the alleged
failures of cowpox to avert the epidemic. The serial numbers of the
_Medical Observer_ contain frequent references to them.
[1092] Letter to Joshua Dixon, in _Memoirs_, III. 368.
[1093] Bateman, _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ VIII. 515.
[1094] C. Stuart, _ibid._ VIII. 380.
[1095] Rigby, _ibid._ X. 120.
[1096] Joshua Dixon, _The Literary Life of William Brownrigg, M.D._
Whitehaven, 1801, pp. 238-9.
[1097] Haygarth says: “With us in Chester, smallpox is seldom heard of
except in the bills of mortality. _There_ its devastation appears dreadful
indeed.” _Sketch of a Plan, &c._ 1793, p. 491.
[1098] Barker and Cheyne, _Account of the Fever, &c._ 2 vols. 1821. I. 92.
[1099] Francis Rogan, M.D., _Obs. on the Condition of the Middle and Lower
Classes in the North of Ireland_. Lond. 1819, p. 17. He proceeds to
say:--“The numerous cases, which came to my knowledge, of children in the
neighbouring towns who had taken smallpox, after having been vaccinated by
medical practitioners of high respectability, led me to pay particular
attention to those whom I myself inoculated [with cowpox]; and, although
they were numerous both in private practice and at the Dispensary, not one
instance occurred among them.” It comes out however that he did not keep
them long in sight; he saw them on the 7th day after vaccination, and
again on the 11th; and as they were meanwhile almost daily exposed to
contagion, without catching it, he concluded that his own cases never
would do so.
[1100] W. L. Kidd. “A concise Account of the Typhus Fever at present
prevalent in Ireland, as it presented itself to the Author in one of the
towns in the North of that country.” _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XIV.
(1817), 144. He goes on: “A great number of those attacked were _reported_
to have been formerly vaccinated. At Londonderry, in particular, great
numbers who were _said_ to have undergone vaccination were the subjects of
smallpox; and, whether justly or not, vaccination has in that part of the
country lost much of its credit as a preservative against smallpox.”
[1101] Redhead (dated Ulverston, 3 July, 1816) in _Med. and Phys. Journ._
Jan. 1817, p. 3.
[1102] James Black, “On Anomalous Smallpox.” _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._
Jan. 1819, p. 39.
[1103] Henry Dewar, M.D., _Account of an Epidemic of Smallpox which
occurred in Cupar in Fife in the Spring of 1817_. Lond. 1818.
[1104] P. Mudie, M.D. to Thomson, 18 Oct. 1818: “Many of the cases
occurring after vaccination so much resembled smallpox that, if my mind
had not been prejudiced against the possibility of such an occurrence, I
should have pronounced the eruption to have been of a variolous
nature”--which, of course, it was.
[1105] Thomson, _Account of the Varioloid Epidemic in Scotland, &c._ Edin.
1820.
[1106] In Thomson, u. s.
[1107] Thomas Bent, M.D., “Observations on an Epidemic Varioloid Disease
lately witnessed in the County of Derby.” _Med. and Phys. Journal_, Dec.
1818, p. 457. One Jennerian, Dr Pew, of Sherborne, adopted an arrogant
tone towards Bent (_Ibid._ April, 1819, and farther correspondence).
Jenner employed Fosbroke, of Berkeley, son of his friend and neighbour the
antiquary Fosbroke, to traverse the whole case of the epidemic of 1817-19,
in a long paper in the _Medical Repository_ for June, 1819. The object of
the paper appears to be to confuse the issues with a view to a verdict of
_non liquet_. The _Edinburgh Review_ thought Thomson’s book on the
epidemic of 1817-19 important enough for an article, which has been
attributed to Jeffrey. The article pronounced vaccination to be a very
great blessing to mankind, but not a complete protection. This was not
enough for Jenner, who wrote of the article: “It will do incalculable
mischief: I put it down at 100,000 deaths at least.”
[1108] John Green Cross, _A History of the Variolous Epidemic which
occurred in Norwich in the year 1819_. Lond. 1820.
[1109] Cross, u. s. Appendix.
[1110] W. Shearman, M.D., “Cases illustrating the Nature of Variolous
Contagion and the Modifying Influence of Vaccine Inoculation.” _Lond. Med.
Repos._ Dec. 1822. Case of a mother, with good vaccine marks, attacked
with smallpox, which became dry and horny about the fifth day; case of her
child, in which the eruption ran the full course of pustules, but also a
mild case.
[1111] _Lond. Med. and Phys. Journ._ May, 1818, p. 488: “By Mr Field’s
report of Christ’s Hospital smallpox in a mild form has been frequent
_post vaccinationem_.”
[1112] Thomas Stone, F.R.C.S. “Table of Deaths from Smallpox in Christ’s
Hospital, 1750 to 1850, with remarks,” in Appendix to _Papers on the
History and Practice of Vaccination: Parl. Papers_, 1857. In 1761 there
were four deaths from smallpox. For ten years, 1775 to 1784, there were
none. In some other years of the latter half of the 18th century there
were one or two deaths from that cause. There must have been some special
reason for the four deaths in 1761. According to Massey (_supra_, p. 545),
the apothecary in the beginning of the 18th century, not one death
happened in forty attacks, the ages from five to eighteen being the most
favourable of all for smallpox to fall in. In the present century
scarlatina has displaced smallpox as an infectious cause of death in that
school as in others. The deaths from scarlatina at Christ’s Hospital
during the six years 1851-56 were nine.
[1113] John Forbes, M.D., “Some Account of the Smallpox lately prevalent
in Chichester and its Vicinity.” _Lond. Med. Repos._ Sept. 1822, p. 208.
[1114] H. W. Carter, M.D., in _Lond. Med. Repos._ Oct. 1824, p. 267: “The
cases which came to light of smallpox after vaccination were unfortunately
numerous; some, it must be confessed, were exceedingly severe; others were
exaggerated.”
[1115] The vaccinations are given in Cleland’s _Rise and Progress of the
City of Glasgow_. Glasgow, 1820. The smallpox deaths from 1813 to 1819 are
given, on Cleland’s authority, in the _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journal_,
XXVI. p. 177.
[1116] R. Watt, M.D., Appendix to _Treatise on Chincough_.
[1117] John Roberton, _Obs. on the Mortality, &c. of Children_. Lond.
1827, p. 59, _note_.
[1118] Gregory, _Report of the London Smallpox Hospital for the year
1825_. Cited in the _Med. and Phys. Journ._ Feb. 1826, p. 176.
[1119] Cross, u. s.
[1120] Carter, u. s.
[1121] T. Proudfoot, M.D., _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ July, 1822.
[1122] C. Stuart, u. s.
[1123] Dr Stokes, of Chesterfield, _Med. and Phys. Journ._ v. 17.
[1124] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., _A Review of the Report of the Royal
College of Physicians on Vaccination_. 1808, p. 11. Jenner writing to
James Moore, 18 Nov. 1812 (in Baron, II. 383), enumerates his various
grievances against Pearson, “and finally, finding all tricking useless,
his insinuations that vaccination is good for nothing.”
[1125] The equality of the two methods in this respect comes out
incidentally in two reports of the Whitehaven Dispensary. In the report
for 1796, when smallpox matter was in use, it is said that “173 were
inoculated, all of whom, soliciting little medical assistance, recovered.”
In 1801, when cowpox matter had been substituted in every case, the same
phrase is used: “We seldom find any medical assistance required in this
disease.”
[1126] _The Beneficial Effects of Inoculation._ Oxford University Prize
Poem. Oxford, 1807. It seems probable that this was the “Oxford copy of
verses on the two Suttons” that Coleridge (_Biographia Literaria_ (1817),
Pickering’s ed. II. 89) professed to quote from in the following passage;
at least it would be remarkable if there had been printed another Oxford
poem on the same subject and in the same manner: “As little difficulty do
we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation
the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness
over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes
and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to Jealousy, to Hope,
to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley’s collection and the magazines of
the day, which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the
two Suttons, commencing with
‘Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!’”
It appears that Coleridge himself contemplated a poem on Cowpox
Inoculation, which was to have exemplified what poetry should be, just as
the 18th century Oxford poem on Smallpox Inoculation exemplified what
poetry should not be. It was clearly more than the difference ’twixt
tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. Writing to Dr Jenner on 27 Sept. 1811, from
7, Portland-place, Hammersmith, he said: “Dear Sir, I take the liberty of
intruding on your time, first, to ask you where and in what publication I
shall find the best and fullest history of the vaccine matter as the
preventive of the smallpox. I mean the year in which the thought first
suggested itself to you (and surely no honest heart would suspect me of
the baseness of flattery if I had said, inspired into you by the
All-preserver, as a counterpoise to the crushing weight of this unexampled
war), and the progress of its realization to the present day. My motives
are twofold: first and principally, the time is now come when the
‘Courier’ ... is open and prepared for a series of essays on this subject;
and the only painful thought that will mingle with the pleasure with which
I shall write them is, that it should be at this day, and in this the
native country of the discoverer and the discovery, be even _expedient_ to
write at all on the subject. My second motive is more selfish. I have
planned a poem on this theme, which after long deliberation, I have
convinced myself is capable in the highest degree of being poetically
treated, according to our divine bard’s [Milton’s] own definition of
poetry, as ‘_simple_, _sensuous_, (i.e. appealing to the senses by
imagery, sweetness of sound, &c.) and _impassioned, &c._’” _The Life of
Edward Jenner, M.D._ By John Baron, M.D. 2 vols. II. 175.
[1127] _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ I. 507.
[1128] Jenner to James Moore, 26 Feb. 1810, in Baron, II. 367.
[1129] Walker to Lettsom, 1 Sept. 1813, in Pettigrew’s _Memoirs of
Lettsom_. Lond. 1817, III. 350.
[1130] Dr Smith to Dr Monro, Dunse, 2 June, 1818, in Monro’s _Obs. on the
different kinds of Smallpox_, 1818. There appears to have been some
reluctance to face the facts. “Though I have seen,” says Smith, “a
multitude of cases in which smallpox has in every possible shape taken
place after vaccination, I feel myself placed in the painful situation
[why painful?] of bringing forward many facts to which gentlemen of the
first eminence in the profession will probably give little or no credit.”
[1131] _Lond. Med. Repository._ Sept. 1822.
[1132] J. J. Cribb, _Smallpox and Cowpox_. Cambridge, 1825.
[1133] _Ibid._ Letter of Rev. R. Marks, of Great Missenden, 6 May, 1824:
“The summer I came here the smallpox was introduced, and as the weather
was very hot, and the confluent sort was what appeared, the people began
to die almost as fast as they took the plague. Great prejudice prevailed
against vaccination, in consequence of the parish having some years ago
been vaccinated by a gentleman who knew nothing of the matter, and
contaminated the people with decomposed virus, when it was good for
nothing but to make ulcers and produced very wretched arms, and left them
all liable to smallpox, which they were all inoculated for the same year.”
This clergyman subsequently vaccinated 500 cases, and the parish surgeon
300: “and here,” says the former, “I had the happiness of seeing the
plague and destruction of a most horrid smallpox completely stopped.”
[1134] Robert Ferguson, M.D. _A Letter to Sir Henry Halford, proposing a
method of Inoculating the Smallpox, which deprives it of all its Danger,
but preserves all its Power of Preventing a Second Attack._ London, 1825.
[1135] John Roberton, _Observations on the Mortality and Physical
Management of Children_. London, 1827, p. 59, _note_.
[1136] J. Dalton, “Smallpox as it prevailed at Bury St Edmunds in 1825.”
_Lond. Med. and Phys. Journ._ May, 1827, p. 406.
[1137] Cribb, u. s.
[1138] “Observation on Smallpox as it has occurred in London in 1825.”
_Med. and Phys. Journ._ Feb. 1826, p. 117.
[1139] _Med. and Phys. Journ._ 1826, p. 122. “The general voice of the
public satisfactorily showed that the upper ranks of society suffered
during the past year from smallpox much less than the lower.”
[1140] Gregory, _Report on the Smallpox Hospital_, 4 Dec. 1825.
[1141] Farr, in the First Report of the Registrar-General (1839, p. 100),
said: “It may be safely asserted that the parish clerks registered little
more than half the deaths that occurred within the limits of the London
bills of mortality.” Outside the limits of the bills there were large
parishes, such as St Pancras, Marylebone, Kensington and Chelsea, which
had large mortalities from smallpox in the first years of registration.
[1142] Tables in Murchison’s _Continued Fevers of Great Britain_.
[1143] _Med. Chir. Trans_, XXIV. 15. His other papers are: “Cursory
Remarks on Smallpox as it occurs subsequent to Vaccination,” _ibid._ XII.
324; and “Notices of the Occurrences at the Smallpox Hospital during the
year 1838,” _ibid._ XXII. 95. He contributed the treatise on Smallpox to
Tweedie’s _Library of Medicine_, I. 1840, and indicated his final opinions
(which are interesting) in his _Lectures on the Eruptive Fevers_, 1843.
[1144] Kenrick Watson, “Medical Topography of Stourport and
Kidderminster.” _Trans. Prov. Med. and Surg. Assoc._ II. 195.
[1145] John Roberton, “On the Increasing Prevalence of Smallpox after
Vaccination.” _Lond. Med. Gaz._ 9 Feb. 1839, p. 711. Roberton had been a
warm supporter of the Jennerian method from as early a date as 1808, when
he was resident in Edinburgh, and again in his book on _The Mortality of
Children_, in 1827. The above cited paper is somewhat satirical, the
disappointing facts of it being referred to the Island of Barataria. His
conclusions are (p. 713): (1) “It is not fact, but conjecture, that the
protective power of cowpox gradually ceases in the human system. (2) It is
not fact, but conjecture, that a person successfully re-vaccinated is less
liable to smallpox than he was before. (3) To affirm that, when
re-vaccination fails in individuals, they are thereby proven to be secure
from smallpox, is conjecture.”
[1146] Cowan, “On the Mortality of Children in Glasgow,” _Glas. Med.
Journ._ V. (1831), p. 358, does not give Cleland’s figures, but says: “No
bills of mortality except those for the Royalty in the _Glasgow Courier_
are in existence for the period from 1812 to 1821”; and again: “Finding
that the suburbs were excluded, and the Calton being the burying-place in
which the greatest number of children are interred, I thought it needless
to insert any tabular view of the deaths by measles since the date of Dr
Watt’s tables.” Watt could have made no tables if he had not gone direct
to the sixteen MS. volumes of burial registers, including those of the
Calton.
[1147] J. C. Steele, _Glas. Med. Journ._ N. S. I. 60: “From 1812 to 1835
it is much to be regretted that no record of the deaths from smallpox has
been kept for even a limited period.”
[1148] _Glas. Med. Journ._ I. 105: “There exists at present among the
poorer classes an increasing carelessness and aversion to vaccination,
from a belief that it does not afford adequate protection from the
varioloid disease.”
[1149] Andrew Buchanan, M.D. “Present Condition of the Poor in Glasgow.”
_Glasg. Med. Journ._ III. (1830), 437.
[1150] Chalmers had been urging the repeal of the Corn Law since 1819. In
a letter to Wilberforce, Glasgow, 15 Dec. 1819, he says: “From my
extensive mingling with the people, I am quite confident in affirming the
power of another expedient to be such that it would operate with all the
quickness and effect of a charm in lulling their agitated spirits--I mean
the repeal of the Corn Bill.” Hanna’s _Memoirs of Dr Chalmers_, 1850, II.
250.
[1151] J. Orgill, “Obs. on the Measles and Smallpox that prevailed
epidemically in Stranraer, in the autumn of 1829.” _Glasg. Med. Journ._
IV. 351.
[1152] McDerment, _ibid._ IV. 201.
[1153] Howison, _ibid._ V. 256-7.
[1154] J. C. Steele, _Glasg. Med. Journ._ N. S. I. 59.
[1155] _Eleventh detailed Report of the Regr.-Genl. for Scotland_, 1865,
p. xxxix. The Report says that vaccination was general during the above
period, although there was no Vaccination Act for Scotland (until 1864).
This was familiar knowledge in Scotland, so much so that the necessity for
a compulsory law, on the English model, was not quite obvious in the
medical circles of Edinburgh. See Christison’s address to the Social
Science Association at Edinburgh in 1863 (p. 106). In my own recollection
of Aberdeenshire, the vaccination of infants was as little neglected as
their baptism; the law made no real difference.
[1156] “An Enquiry into the Mortality among the Poor in the City of
Limerick.” _Journ. Statist. Soc._ Jan. 1841, III. 316.
[1157] _The Census of Ireland_, 1841. Parl. Papers, 1843. Report on the
Tables of Deaths, by W. R. Wilde.
[1158] From the Second Report of the Registrar-General, Lond. 1840, p.
180.
[1159] 1840.
1st qr. 2nd qr. 3rd qr. 4th qr.
Liverpool 172 184 90 85
Bath 25 42 22 8
Exeter -- -- 1 1
Bristol 6 54 49 76
Clifton 11 28 22 42
[1160] Douglass to Colden, 1 May, 1722, in _Massach. Hist. Soc. Collect._
Series 4, vol. II. p. 169.
[1161] Philip Rose, M.D., _Essays on the Smallpox_. London, 1724, p. 76.
[1162] Rev. R. Houlton, App. to _A Sermon in Defence of Inoculation_,
Chelmsford, 1767, p. 59: “For, had the indictment been found, he would
have assuredly nonsuited his enemies, and have proved beyond a possibility
of doubt that he never brought into Chelmsford a patient who was capable
of infecting a bystander, notwithstanding such person would convey
infection by inoculation. However paradoxical this may seem, it is truth,
and would have been proved to a demonstration.”
[1163] Darwin, _Animals and Plants under Domestication_, II. 356: “From
these facts we clearly see that the quantity of the peculiar formative
matter which is contained within the spermatozoa and pollen-grains is an
all-important element in the act of fertilization, not only for the full
development of the seed, but for the vigour of the plant produced from
such seed.”
[1164] J. C. Lettsom, M.D., _A Letter to Sir Robert Barker, F.R.S. and G.
Stackpoole, Esq. upon General Inoculation_. London, 1778, p. 8.
[1165] W. Black, M.D., _Observations Medical and Political on the
Smallpox, etc._ London, 1781, p. 103.
[1166] “But, in the cowpox, no pustules appear, nor does it seem possible
for the contagious matter to produce the disease from effluvia, or by any
other means than contact, and that probably not simply between the virus
and the cuticle; so that a single individual in a family might at any time
receive it without the risk of infecting the rest, or of spreading a
distemper that fills a country with terror.”
[1167] _Parliamentary Papers_, 1807, 8th July.
[1168] Bateman, _Reports etc._ 1819, p. 102. The principle of the Common
Law on which the judgment rested was, “Sic utere tuo ut alienum non
laedas.”
[1169] Joseph Adams, _An Inquiry into the Laws of Epidemics, with Remarks
on the Plans lately proposed for Exterminating the Smallpox_. London,
1809. The _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journal_ (VI. 231), in a long review of
this essay, declared that Adams was inconsistent in reaffirming his old
faith in cowpox and at the same time demanding liberty for the
inoculators.
[1170] J. C. Steele, M.D., “Increase of Smallpox in Glasgow.” _Glas. Med.
Journ._ N. S. I. 59. The Paris figures are cited from the _Annuaire pour
l’an 1852-53_.
[1171] I do not, of course, answer for the correctness of Gregory’s
statements.
[1172] _Lancet_, 12 Dec. 1838.
[1173] 409 of these in Sheffield.
[1174] There are two notable exceptions, marked †, Lancashire and
Yorkshire; but, in regard to their higher mortality from smallpox in
1837-40, it should be kept in mind that they were the chief scenes of the
great distress among the working class in those years, the same causes
which produced an enormous mortality from typhus fever in adults having
tended to increase the fatality of smallpox among the children.
[1175] In the first universal and very fatal epidemic of measles, that of
1808, a good many adults, who had not had measles before, were attacked.
See the chapter on Measles.
[1176] The accounts by Fothergill, Wall and others, of the malignant
sore-throat with scarlet rash about 1740 give prominence to cases in early
manhood or womanhood.
[1177] _Supplement (Decennial) to the 45th Report of the Regr.-Genl._
1885, p. cxii.
[1178] The figures for 1721 are cited above (p. 485) from Douglass and
others. Those for 1752 are given in the _Gent. Magaz._ 1753, Sept., p.
413, as “collected from the Accounts of the Overseers in the Twelve
several Wards,” and sent by the Rev. T. Prince.
[1179] _Supplementary Report of the Registrar-General_, 1883. The mean
death rate per 1000 living, for the period 1838-82, has been 71·0 males,
and 61·2 females under five years of age; but as late as 1878 the annual
average was the mean of the period, namely 71·2 males and 61·1 females.
[1180] Lettsom (_Gent. Magaz._ 1804, Aug. p. 701), in a preface to Neild’s
papers on the state of the prisons, estimated that 40,000 lives might be
saved every year in England by preventing infectious fevers, “for in this
metropolis my respectable friend Thomas Bernard, Esq., whose caution and
accuracy no person will doubt, calculates the number of victims at 3000
each year [doubtless from the London Bills of Mortality].... If to this
pleasing view we add the preservation of 48,000 victims to the smallpox,
which may now be preferred by the cowpox, we have in our power to possess
the sublime contemplation of forming a saving fund of human life of nearly
88,000 persons annually in this empire, by the exercise of reason,
philanthropy and judicious policy.”
[1181] Duvillard, _Tableaux etc._ Paris, 1806.
[1182] _Essay on the Principle of Population._ Bk. IV. chap. 5.
[1183] Robert Watt, M.D. _Treatise on Chincough, with Inquiry into the
Relative Mortality of the Diseases of Children in Glasgow._ Glasgow, 1813.
[1184] John Graunt, _Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of
Mortality_, London, 1662, says: “The original entries in the Hall books
were as exact in the very first year [he probably means 1629, which is the
first year of his own extracts from them, but the classification of deaths
began in 1604] as to all particulars, as now; and the specifying of
casualties and diseases was probably more.” The searchers, he explains,
were in many cases able to report the opinions of the physicians,
receiving the same from the friends of the deceased; while for certain
causes of death, among which he includes smallpox, “their own senses are
sufficient.”
[1185] _Cal. Coke MSS._ (Hist. MSS. Commis.) I. 21 June, 1628.
[1186] Sutherland Letters, in _Rep. Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 152.
[1187] _Cal. State Papers, Domestic. Charles II._ s. d. It appears from
the _Pyretologia_ by Drage, of Hitchin (1665), that the natural history of
measles must have been familiar, for he mentions that its incubation
period was from fourteen to fifteen days: p. 20.
[1188] _Obs. Med._ 3rd ed. (1675), Bk. IV. chap. 5.
[1189] Sydenham, _Obs. Med._ 1675, V. 3. “Morbilli anni 1674.” It entered
almost every household, as on the last occasion, attacking infants more
especially. It had some points of difference from the measles of 1670. The
rash was less uniformly on the fourth day, now sooner, now later; it would
come on the arms or trunk before the face; nor was it followed by the
branny powdering which was as obvious in the measles of 1670 as it was
usual to see it after scarlatina. Along with these anomalies of the rash,
the consecutive fever and peripneumonia were also more severe, and a more
frequent cause of death. But in the principal characters of measles the
disease of 1674 was the same as that of 1670, and called for no fresh
description. Among Sydenham’s patients were the children of the Countess
of Salisbury, who all took measles in turn, and all passed through the
attack and its sequelae without danger, under a particular regimen which
is detailed. It is of great interest to see how this season of anomalous
measles looks in the weekly bills, as in the above table.
[1190] Richard Morton, M.D. _Pyretologia._ 2 vols. Lond. 1692-94, I. 427.
He places it in the year 1672 and in the six months of autumn and winter;
and in another place (II. 71), where he cites clinical cases, he again
gives the year 1672 as that in which measles “epidemice Londini publice
grassabantur.” He compares the epidemic to a _pestis mitior_, and says
that the disease had never been epidemic again to the date of his writing
(1692-94). It is tolerably clear that, in writing twenty years after, he
had forgotten the year and even the season--not the only error in dates in
his work. Sydenham’s account of the great measles epidemic of spring and
summer, 1674, was published the year after, and is exactly borne out by
the weekly bills of mortality. Morton’s obvious mistake of the date is the
subject of a refutation four pages long by Thomas Dickson, M.D., F.R.S.,
physician to the London Hospital, in _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, IV.
(1771), p. 266.
[1191] Fothergill (_Gentleman’s Magazine_, Dec. 1751) says, in a criticism
of the Bills of Mortality: “If the body is emaciated, which may happen
even from an acute fever, ’tis enough for them to place it to the article
of consumption.” And of course they would do so the more readily if the
acute fever, say measles, were past, and its sequelae had been the cause
of death. Referring to Kidderminster in 1756, Johnstone says: “Measles at
this time went through our town and neighbourhood: vast numbers of
children died tabid.” It is to be remarked that the fever column is
augmented but little during the measles of 1674, a fact which shows that
the inflammatory causes of death, such as capillary bronchitis and
pneumonia (specially recorded by Sydenham for this epidemic), were more
apt to be entered under “consumption” than under “fevers.”
[1192] See Watson’s account of smallpox following measles at the Foundling
Hospital, _supra_, p. 550.
[1193] It may have been this high mortality that Dover had in mind when he
wrote, in 1733: “I do not remember I ever heard of anyone’s dying of this
disease [measles] till about twenty-five years since; but of late, by the
help of Gascoin’s powder and bezoartic bolusses, together with blisters
and a hot regimen, the blood is so highly inflamed and the fever encreased
to that degree that it is become equally mortal with the smallpox.”
_Physician’s Legacy_, 1733, p. 116.
[1194] Memorial to the House of Commons, _supra_, p. 84.
[1195] _Edin. Med. Essays and Obs._ V. 26.
[1196] Pronounced by Sims to have been wholly scarlatina, and by Willan to
have been in part that disease.
[1197] Monthly reports in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, under the dates.
[1198] Heberden’s paper on measles in _Trans. Col. Phys._ III. (1785), pp.
389, 395.
[1199] W. Black, M.D., _Obs. Med. and Political on the Smallpox, &c._
London, 1781, p. 207: “Few escape measles in infancy or childhood, and as
we find one-tenth fewer to die of measles than of smallpox, etc.... In
their future consequences, measles, especially in cities, are not without
hazard, and are not unfrequently followed by hecticks.”
[1200] Percival, in _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, V. (1776), p. 282.
[1201] Omitting the year 1760.
[1202] Compiled from the tables in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1742-57.
All Saints parish contained more than half the population.
[1203] Pearce, writing from St Croix, West Indies, 12 Oct. 1782, to
Lettsom (_Memoirs_, III. 429), says the measles had been “very rife and
fatal” there.
[1204] MS. Apothecary’s Books at the Foundling Hospital.
[1205] R. Willan, M.D., _On Cutaneous Diseases_. Vol. I. 1808, p. 244.
[1206] Heysham, u. s., p. 538.
[1207] James Lucas, “On Measles.” _Lond. Med. Journ._ XI. 325, dated 22
Aug. 1790.
[1208] _Reports on the Diseases of London, 1796-1800._ Lond. 1801, pp. 2,
13, 18, 32, 229.
[1209] John Roberton, in _Med. and Phys. Journ._ XIX. 185. Measles seems
to have been more usual than scarlatina in Scotland as well as in Ireland.
In the accounts of the several parishes written for the _Statistical
Account_, about 1791-99, measles is often mentioned (and would appear at
that time to have been more usual in country districts than smallpox),
while hardly anything is said of scarlatina under that name, and not much
of sore-throat.
[1210] _Med. and Phys. Journ._ VII. (1802), p. 316.
[1211] “Observations on Measles.” By Mr Edlin, surgeon, Uxbridge. _Med.
and Phys. Journ._ VIII. (July-Dec. 1802), p. 28. An earlier epidemic of
anomalous eruptive fever (“dark coloured eruption of the neck and breast
which spread at length over the whole body”) was described for Uxbridge
and its vicinity in the summer and autumn of 1799, in an essay reviewed in
_British Critic_, XV. 435.
[1212] T. Bateman, M.D., _Report on the Diseases of London, 1804-16_.
Lond. 1819, p. 90-91.
[1213] Samuel Fothergill, M.D., and others, in _Med. and Phys. Journ._
XVIII. (Dec. 1807), pp. 569, 572; XIX. 91, 185.
[1214] “The Epidemic Measles of 1808.” By Dr Ferguson. _Med. and Phys.
Journ._ XXI. 359.
[1215] John Roberton, _Med. and Phys. Journ._ XIX. 182, 272, 278, 471.
[1216] Roberton, _loc. cit._ XIX. 471.
[1217] In the earlier period, according to Grainger, Lind and others,
numerous cases of measles sometimes occurred on board ships of war.
[1218] Published as an Appendix to his _Treatise on the History, Nature
and Treatment of Chincough_. Glasgow, 1813. Reprinted by John Thomson,
Glasgow, 1888. Dr Watt is best known by his _Bibliotheca Britannica_
(Edinburgh, 1819. 4 vols. 4to.), a wonderfully complete bibliography under
the dual arrangement of subjects and authors, which is still indispensable
for research in every branch of knowledge. Perhaps the many who use it are
not all aware that it was the labour of a physician in Glasgow (originally
a surgeon at Paisley), who died (in 1819) at the age of forty-five, having
reached such professional distinction in his own city as to be elected
President of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons.
[1219] _De Febribus_, 1659. Cap. XV.
[1220] _Sketch of a Plan to exterminate the Casual Smallpox, &c._ London,
1793, p. 152.
[1221] It was believed that smallpox left ill effects in some
constitutions. William III. is said to have had the dregs of smallpox in
his lungs. Roberton (u. s.) cites Saunders as teaching that smallpox
caused scrofula, and he is himself doubtful whether an attack of it ever
improved the constitution. Dr Moses Younghusband, of New Lebanon Springs,
_Med. Phys. Journ._ XI. (1804), 317, wrote: “I see no more of the
glandular suppurations formerly so frequent and unavoidable” after
smallpox.
[1222] Johnstone, _Malignant Epidemic Fever of 1756_, London, 1757, says
of Kidderminster during a season of high mortality from fever and other
diseases: “The measles at this time went through our town and
neighbourhood. The children commonly got over the usual course of this
distemper; but vast numbers died tabid of its consequences. The chincough
succeeded the measles.”
[1223] The _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XXVI. 177, cites from Cleland,
with a reference which I have not succeeded in verifying, the following
Glasgow figures for the period 1813-19: all deaths 22,060, smallpox 236
(1·07 per cent.), measles 614 (3·69 per cent.). But see Cowan, _Glas. Med.
Journ._ V. 358, _supra_, p. 597.
[1224] Cowan, _Journ. Statist. Soc._ III.
[1225] Griffin, _ibid._ III.
[1226] Macmichael, in an essay on scarlatina and other contagions, 1822,
says: “Parents considering the measles as a disease almost inevitable have
wisely chosen to expose their children to the contagion at such auspicious
times [summer season]; so that the disorder may be once well over, and all
further anxiety at an end.” p. 30.
[1227] P. Macgregor, _Med. Chir. Trans._ V. 436, obtained from Henry, of
Manchester, the burials from measles at the Collegiate Church and St
John’s Church for two years, 1812-13, which when compared with those
abstracted by Percival from the former register for twenty years, 1754-74,
showed a higher ratio of measles to the burials from all causes.
[1228] Cross, u. s.
[1229] Delagarde, _Med. Chir. Trans._ XIII. 163.
[1230] A. Campbell Monro, M.D., “Measles: an Epidemiological Study.”
Chiefly from the Jarrow statistics. _Trans. Epid. Soc._ N. S. X.
(1890-91), p. 94. The author connects the recent increase with the greater
concourse of children to infant and elementary schools under the Education
Act.
[1231] _Rep. Reg.-Genl._ LIV. p. xviii, and LV. p. xi. The explanation
given is as follows: “When a county or other area has been visited by a
severe epidemic [of measles] there is for several succeeding years
scarcely sufficient material, in the shape of unprotected children, for
another considerable outbreak, unless it be in very populous areas such as
London or Liverpool; and in such places the disease is endemic.”
[1232] Buchan and Mitchell, _Journ. Scot. Meteor. Soc._ July, 1874, p.
194.
[1233] Ogle, in the 47th Report of the Registrar-General (for 1884), p.
xv.
[1234] Cited by Hirsch, _Geogr. and Histor. Pathology_. Eng. transl. III.
28.
[1235] _Harl. MSS._ No. 2378. Moulton’s _This is the Myrour or Glasse of
Health_, circa 1540, is in the main a printed reproduction of this
manuscript prescription-book. The same receipt which is “for ye kink” in
the one, is “for the chyncough” in the other (formula LXXIX.).
[1236] “Sycknesses happenynge to children:--When they be new borne, there
do happen to them sores of the mouth called aphte, vometyng, coughes,
watchinge, fearefulness, inflamations of the nauelle, moysture of the
eares. When they brede tethe, ytchinge of the gummes, fevers, crampes and
laskes. When they waxe elder, than be they greved with kernelles,
opennesse of the mould of the head, shortnesse of wynde, the stone of the
bladder, wormes of the bealy, waters, swellynges under the chynne, and in
Englande commonly purpyles, measels and small pockes.”
[1237] _Obs. Med._ 3rd ed. Bk. IV. chap. V. § 8; _Epist. Respons._ I. §
42.
[1238] Mary Barker at Hambleton, to Abel Barker at the Dog and Ball in
Fleet Street. _Hist. MSS. Commis._ V. 398.
[1239] _Tractatus de morbis acutis infantum._ Lond. 1689. Englished by W.
Cockburn, M.D. London, 1693, pp. 38, 78, 87.
[1240] _Gent. Magaz._ 1751, pp. 195, 578.
[1241] _Treatise on Chincough._ Glasgow, 1813.
[1242] Vierordt, _Physiologie des Kindesalters_, Tübingen, 1877, p. 82,
without adducing evidence that the larynx is congenitally different in the
two sexes (a matter of very nice measurements which even Beneke does not
appear to have attempted), says that the development of the posterior
glottidean space has advanced before puberty much more in boys than in
girls. Stark, a former Superintendent of Statistics for Scotland (_Rep.
Reg. Gen. Scot. for 1856_, p. xxxviii), has raised the question thus: “The
causes of this greater liability of the female sex to death while
suffering from whooping-cough are worthy of being investigated. So far as
one’s own limited experience goes, it would appear to be produced by the
greater tendency which the female sex exhibits to have fits or convulsions
when attacked by a paroxysm or fit of coughing in that disease.”
[1243] _Changes in the Air, &c. ... in Barbadoes._ Lond. 1760.
[1244] In the Irish Decennial Summary for 1871-80 (_Suppl. to 17th Report
of Reg.-Gen. Ireland_, 1884) it is said: “A general relation has been
noticed by many observers between the prevalence of whooping-cough and
measles, and there is no doubt that in many localities an epidemic of
measles is frequently accompanied by or followed by a prevalence of
whooping-cough. A comparison of the figures in Table XV. does not point to
any very close relationship. Whooping-cough was a much more fatal disease
than measles, but it is more than probable that measles was equally
prevalent.”
[1245] _Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease._ London, 1886
[1885]. Chapter VI. pp. 64-83.
[1246] _Med. Times and Gaz._ 1885, II. p. 6.
[1247] Preface to 3rd ed. of _Obs. Med._, Greenhill’s ed. p. 16.
[1248] _Sydenhami Opera_, ed. Greenhill, 1844, p. 243.
[1249] Maton, _Med. Trans. Col. Phys._ V., having seen an extensive
epidemic attended by a red rash in one of the great public schools, was
disposed to erect it into a new type of roseola, owing to its mildness,
while he admitted that it was the same as Sydenham’s scarlatina simplex.
Macmichael (_New View of the Infection of Scarlet Fever_, 1822, p. 78)
thought that this was “rather a proof of extreme refinement,” and that
there was no need to give it a new designation. Gee, _Brit. Med. Journ._,
1883, II. 236, cites this “refinement” of Maton’s as one of the noteworthy
things in the history of the diseases of children in this country.
[1250] Sir Robert Sibbald, M.D., _Scotia Illustrata, sive Prodromus
Historiae Naturalis_. Edin. 1684. Lib. II. cap. 5, p. 55.
[1251] Richard Morton, M.D. _Pyretologia._ 2 vols. London, 1692-94, II.
69.
[1252] Engl. transl. 1737, p. 80. The reference by Dover (_Ancient
Physician’s Legacy_, 1732, p. 117), is almost in the words of Sydenham,
his master: “This is a fever of a milder kind than the measles [of which
latter he did not remember anyone’s dying till about twenty-five years
since], and does not want the assistance of a doctor. The skin seems to be
universally inflamed, but the inflammation goes off in forty-eight hours.”
[1253] _Edin. Med. Essays and Obs._ III. 26.
[1254] _Obs. de aere et morb. epid._
[1255] H. Warren, M.D., _On the Malignant Fever in Barbados_. London,
1740, p. 73.
[1256] Le Cat, in _Phil. Trans._ XLIX. 49: In 1736 and 1737, a prevalence
of gangrenous sore-throats which chiefly attacked children. They
reappeared in 1748 in young persons of the first distinction, not only at
Rouen, but also at St Cyr, near Versailles, and at Paris.
[1257] Webster, _Brief History of Epidemick and Pestilential Diseases_.
Hartford, 1799, II. 253: “Away, then, with crowded cities--the thirty feet
lots and alleys, the artificial reservoirs of filth, the hot-beds of
atmospheric poison! Such are our cities--they are great prisons, built
with immense labour to breed infection and hurrying mankind prematurely to
the grave.”
[1258] W. Douglass, M.D., _The Practical History of a New Epidemical
Eruptive Miliary Fever, with an Angina Ulcusculosa, which prevailed in New
England in the years 1735 and 1736_. Boston, N.E. 1736. This rare essay
was reprinted in the _New England Journ. of Med. and Surg._ XIV. 1 (Jan.
1825).
[1259] In Belknap’s _History of New Hampshire_. Boston, 1791.
[1260] _Gent. Magaz._ Feb. 1752, p. 73.
[1261] The account by Kearsley, of Philadelphia, written about 1769
(_Gent. Magaz._ XXXIX. 251), refers to a great epidemic of throat-disease
in New England in the spring, summer and autumn of 1746; but the date is
almost certainly a mistake for 1736, as no such epidemic is known on
contemporary authority.
[1262] Cadwallader Colden, M.D. “Letter to Dr Fothergill on the Throat
Distemper,” dated New York, 1 Oct. 1753, in _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, I.
211.
[1263] Belknap, III. 421.
[1264] Samuel Bard, M.D. “An Inquiry into the Nature, Cause and Cure of
the Angina Suffocativa, or Sore throat Distemper, as it is commonly called
by the inhabitants of this city and colony.” _Trans. Amer. Philos. Soc._
I. (1769-1771). Philad. 1771, p. 322. What purports to be a translation of
this, is given in Reutte’s _Recueil d’Obs. sur le Croup_ (Paris, 1810),
the name of “croup” being introduced into the title, and some strange
liberties taken with the text.
[1265] The impression made upon modern historians by these American
accounts of the throat-distemper has not always been the same. Hecker
finds in the malady described by Douglass the form of _Frieselbräune_, or
miliary diphtheria, a somewhat rare and sporadic malady; in the account by
Bard, he finds _häutige Brandbräune_, or membranous angina maligna; while
he finds in an account by Chalmers for Charleston, S. Carolina, in 1770, a
third variety, _Friesel-Scharlachbräune_, or miliary scarlet angina.
Again, Jaffe finds in the account by Bard “many analogies with the
diphtheria of our own day.” Hirsch identifies the throat-distemper of
Douglass and Colden as “exquisite scarlet fever” and the disease described
by Bard as diphtheria. Häser identifies the epidemic described by Douglass
as diphtheria. Bard himself did not doubt that the disease which he saw in
New York previous to 1771 was the same that Douglass saw at Boston in
1735-36. Hecker, _Geschichte der neueren Heilkunde_. Bk. I. chap. 8. Max
Jaffe, “Die Diphtherie in epidemiol. u. nosol. Beziehung, &c.” Original
paper in _Schmidt’s Jahrbücher_, CXIII. (1862), p. 97. Hirsch, 1st ed. of
_Handb. der histor. geogr. Pathol._ I. 237, note 6; II. 125, note 4; and
2nd ed. III. 80. Eng. transl. Häser, _Geschichte, &c._ III. 471.
[1266] _Gent. Magaz._ IX. Nov. 1739, p. 606:--Died, “Nov. 27, the eldest
and youngest son of Henry Pelham, Esq. of sore throats.”
[1267] John Chandler, F.R.S., _A Treatise of the Disease called a Cold.
Also a Short Description of the Genuine nature and seat of the Putrid
Sore-Throat._ London, 1761, p. 55.
[1268] Munk, _Roll of the College of Physicians_. Fothergill cites Spanish
and other foreign writers on garrotillo in the historical introduction to
his essay on the Sore-Throat (1748), without mentioning the fact that
Letherland had been before him in that field.
[1269] John Rutty, M.D., _Chronological History of the Weather and
Seasons, and prevailing Diseases in Dublin, during forty years_. London,
1770, p. 108.
[1270] John Starr, M.D., “Account of the Morbus Strangulatorius.” _Phil.
Trans._ XLVI. 435, dated Liskeard, Jan. 10, 1749/50.
[1271] John Fothergill, M.D., _An Account of the Sore Throat attended with
Ulcers; a Disease which hath of late years appeared in this City and the
parts adjacent_. London, 1748.
[1272] Sir Thomas Watson (_Lectures_, II. 817), who mentions excoriations
of the anus, carried Fothergill’s idea of an absorption of the acrid
matter to an extreme length in explaining the irritation of the alimentary
canal in scarlet fever.
[1273] Letter to Rutty, _Chronol. Hist._ 1770, p. 117.
[1274] _Gent. Magaz._ Oct. 1751, and July, 1755, p. 343.
[1275] Nathaniel Cotton, M.D. _Observations on a particular kind of
Scarlet Fever that lately prevailed in and about St Albans._ In a Letter
to Dr Mead. London, 1749 (12th February). The copy in the British Museum
library has a written note signed R. W. (Robert Willan, M.D.): “The only
just and correct account; but was not noticed during the author’s
lifetime, and it has since been consigned to oblivion.” In his work _On
Cutaneous Diseases_ (1808), Willan sarcastically contrasts the means by
which Fothergill gained fame while Cotton escaped notice; of the latter he
says: “But, as he gave an old appellation to a disease certainly not new,
his work attracted little attention, and procured him no emolument.”
[1276] John Huxham, M.D., _A Dissertation on the Malignant Ulcerous
Sore-Throat_. London, 1757.
[1277] _Supra_, p. 125.
[1278] John Wall, M.D. “Bark in the Ulcerated Sore Throat.” _Gent. Magaz._
1751, Nov. p. 497. Dated Worcester, 15 Oct. 1751.
[1279] Nash, _History of Worcestershire_, II. 39.
[1280] James Johnstone, M.D., _Malignant Epidemic Fever of 1756_. London,
1758.
[1281] To those who explicitly distinguished the sore-throat or angina
maligna from scarlatina may be added Dr Richard Russell: “In hoc quidem
morbi statu mitissimo, si ad quartum vel quintum usque diem eruptiones in
cute superstites sint, paulatim recedant, et desquamationes furfuraceae,
perinde ut in febre scarlatina, post se reliquant, ibi crisis integra et
perfectissima est.” _Œconomia Naturae in Morbis Acutis et Chronicis
Glandularum._ Lond. 1755, p. 105 seq.
[1282] _Letters of Horace Walpole_, ed. Cunningham, III. 280, letter to
Mann, 20 Jan. 1760.
[1283] Charles Bisset, _Essay on the Medical Constitution of Great
Britain, with obs. on the weather and diseases in 1758-60_. London, 1762.
[1284] Hecker (u. s.) identified Bisset’s epidemic disease in Cleveland
with Douglass’s in New England. Merely because they used the term
“miliary,” he erects their epidemics into an imaginary class of _angina
miliaris_ which was not scarlatina.
[1285] Short to Rutty, Rotherham, 26 March, 1760, in Rutty’s _Chronol.
Hist. of Weather, &c. and Diseases in Dublin_. London, 1770, p. 117.
[1286] Sir David Hamilton, _Tractatus Duplex, &c._ London, 1710 (Engl.
transl. 1737, p. 84), says that, in 1704, several in the “miliary fever”
had “a pain in the jaws resembling that of the squinsy,” which killed many
suddenly. At the other end of the century, Willan (_Cutaneous Diseases_,
1808, p. 333), said of fever in 1786: “The title ‘angina maligna’ would
have applied with equal, if not with more propriety, to the sore-throat
connected with a different species of contagion, namely, that of the
typhus or malignant fever originating in the habitations of the poor where
no attention is paid to cleanliness or ventilation.”
[1287] Francis Penrose, _A Dissertation on the Inflammatory, Gangrenous
and Putrid Sore-Throat. Also on the Putrid Fever._ Oxford, 1766.
[1288] _Some Thoughts on the Anomalous Malignant Measles lately peculiarly
prevalent in the Western Parts of England._ London, 1760. And to be sold
at Bath and Exeter.
[1289] William Watson, M.D. “An Account of the Putrid Measles as they were
observed at London in the years 1763 and 1768.” _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_,
IV. (1771), p. 132.
[1290] James Clarke, M.D. “Medical Report for Nottingham from March, 1807,
to March, 1808.” _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ IV. 425.
[1291] These changes of the name from week to week represent probably the
independent judgment of the apothecary more than the modified opinions of
Watson the physician. The views which the latter expressed in his paper of
1771, are clearly reechoed in the following anonymous paragraph in the
_Gent. Magaz._ XLII. (1772), Nov. p. 541: “The measles have lately been
very rife and fatal in this metropolis. They are of a very different kind
from those described by the great Doctor Sydenham, being of a malignant
putrid nature, such as visited London in 1763 and 1768, where bleeding
seemed of so little service, but small doses of emetic tartar, cordial
medicines and blisters, were very efficacious. The above disorder was
epidemic at Plymouth and parts adjacent in the years 1745 and 1750, and so
long since as the year 1762 [1672] was described by Dr Morton, who says it
raged so severely during the autumn of that year that it appeared like a
gentle kind of plague, sparing neither sex nor age, and that 300 died
weekly of it.”
[1292] W. Grant, M.D., _Account of a Fever and Sore Throat in London,
September, 1776_. London, 1777.
[1293] W. Fordyce, M.D., _A new Inquiry into the Causes, Symptoms and Cure
of Putrid and Inflammatory Fevers; with an Appendix on the Hectic Fever,
and on the Ulcerated and Malignant Sore Throat_. London, 1773. The
appendix on Sore-throat is pp. 209-222.
[1294] _Gent. Magaz._ XLII. (1772), June, p. 258.
[1295] G. Levison, M.D., _An Account of the Epidemical Sore-Throat_. 2nd
ed. corrected. London, 1778 (1st ed. 1778).
[1296] It might have been the third, as Grant (u. s.) says there was fever
with sore-throat in London in September, 1776.
[1297] “Angina and Scarlet Fever of 1778.” _Mem. Med. Soc._ III. 355.
[1298] James Johnstone, junr. M.D., _A Treatise on the Malignant Angina or
Putrid and Ulcerous Sore-Throat, &c._ Worcester, 1779.
[1299] Robert Saunders, _Observations on the Sore-Throat and Fever in the
North of Scotland in 1777_. London, 1778.
[1300] William Withering, M.D., _Account of the Scarlet Fever and
Sore-Throat, particularly as it appeared at Birmingham in 1778_. London,
1779; preface dated 1st January.
[1301] Withering was perhaps too desirous to be thought the first in
England to have described scarlatina anginosa. “The scarlet fever in its
simple state,” he says, “is not a very uncommon disease in England, but
its combination with a sore-throat, as described above, the violence of
its attack, and the train of fatal symptoms that follow, are circumstances
hitherto unnoticed by English writers.” It is probable from this that he
had not seen Levison’s essay, with preface dated 11 May, 1778, his own
being dated 1 January, 1779; but Cotton’s essay of 1749 actually bore the
name of scarlet fever on its title-page, and described the
throat-affection, glandular swellings, and the like quite correctly.
The name of the elder Heberden is frequently brought into the history of
the identification of scarlatina, with a reference to his _Commentaries on
Diseases_, which were not published until 1802, some time after his death
at a very advanced age. The following are among his remarks: “In the fever
which has just been described there is always some degree of redness in
the skin, and the throat is not without an uneasy sensation. Where it
happens that the throat is full of little ulcers attended with
considerable pain, there the disease, though the skin be ever so red, is
not denominated from the colour, but from the soreness of the throat, and
obtains the name of _malignant sore-throat_; and many suppose that the two
disorders differ in nature as well as in name,” p. 23. “The enfeebled and
disordered state of all the functions of the body evidently points out
such a malignity of the fever as cannot be owing to the affection of the
uvula or tonsils, which in other distempers we often see ulcerated and
eaten away, without any danger of the patient’s life. These sores,
therefore, like pestilential buboes, point out the nature of the disorder;
but the danger arises, not from them, but from the fever,” p. 25.
In 1790 an elaborate attempt was made by William Lee Perkins, M.D. (dating
from Hampton Court, 1 March) to distinguish between cynanche maligna and
scarlatina anginosa, in _An Essay for a Nosological and Comparative View
of the Cynanche Maligna or Putrid Sore-Throat, and the Scarlatina
Anginosa_. London, 1790. He proceeds by the nosological method of Sauvages
and Cullen, erecting genera, species and varieties. The result is not
clear after all; for on p. 43 (note) we read that _scarlatina_ is
frequently accompanied with inflammatory and ulcerous appearances in the
fauces or throat, and that _angina maligna_ or ulcerated sore-throat is
often attended with red efflorescence on the skin; this had led to their
being regarded as one and the same, and treated by the same method of
cure.
[1302] J. Parker, _A Treatise on the Putrid Constitution of 1777 and the
preceding years, and the Pestilential one of 1778_. London, 1779 (of
inferior value beside Withering’s).
[1303] Heysham, in Hutchinson’s _Hist. of Cumberland_, u. s.
[1304] John Clark, M.D., _Obs. on Fevers, and on the Scarlet Fever with
Ulcerated Sore-Throat at Newcastle in 1778_. Lond. 1780; _Account of the
Newcastle Dispensary from its commencement in 1777 to Michaelmas, 1789_.
Newcastle, 1789 (also by Clark).
[1305] James Sims, M.D. “Scarlatina Anginosa as it appeared in London in
1786.” _Mem. Med. Soc. Lond._ I. 388. Willan, however, says that measles
was the epidemic in the winter and spring of 1785-86; while the epidemic
at the Foundling Hospital was “measles” in March and April, 1786, “fever”
in June and July, and “scarlet fever” in 1787.
[1306] _On Cutaneous Diseases._ Vol. I. London, 1808, pp. 262, 277, 345.
[1307] I Have Not Succeeded in Finding the Apothecary’s Book for the Years
1776-82, Within Which the Great London Epidemic of 1777-78 Fell; But
Willan, Who May Have Had the Complete Set of Books Before Him, Says (_op.
cit._ 1808, P. 245) “the Denomination ‘scarlet Fever and Sore-throat’
First Occurs in the Weekly Report, 1st September, 1787.” I am Indebted To
the Courtesy of Mr Swift, M.R.C.S. for A Sight of the Books.
[1308] J. Barker, _Epidemicks, Or General Observations on the Air and
Diseases From The Year 1740 To 1777 Inclusive, and Particular Ones From
That Time To the Beginning Of 1795_. Birmingham (no Date).
[1309] _Lond. Med. Journ._ XI. 374.
[1310] H. Rumsey, “Epidemic Sore-Throat at Chesham in 1788.” _Lond. Med.
Journal_, X. 7, dated 14 Dec. 1788.
[1311] H. Rumsey, “An Account of the Croup as it appeared in the Town and
Neighbourhood of Chesham, in Buckinghamshire, in the years 1793 and 1794.”
_Trans. of a Soc. for Improving Med. and Chirurg. Knowledge_, II. (1800),
25. Read 1 July, 1794.
[1312] “Several children brought up portions of a film, or membrane of a
whitish colour, resembling the coagulated matter which was found in the
trachea of those children whose bodies were opened. This was thrown off by
violent coughing or retching; and the efforts made to dislodge it were
often so distressing that the child appeared almost in a state of
strangulation.”
[1313] Sinclair’s _Statist. Account of Scotland_, IX. 190.
[1314] _Ibid._ II. 412.
[1315] _Ibid._ IX. 461.
[1316] Livingston to Lettsom, Aberdeen, 13 May, 1790, in _Memoirs of Dr
Lettsom_, III.
[1317] R. Willan, M.D., _Reports on the Diseases in London, 1796-1800_.
Lond. 1801, p. 2.
[1318] “Cursory Remarks on the Appearance of the Angina Scarlatina in the
Spring of 1793.” _Mem. Med. Soc. Lond._ IV. (1795), p. 280.
[1319] W. Rowley, M.D., _An Essay on the Malignant ulcerated Sore-Throat,
containing reflections on its causes and fatal effects in 1787, etc._,
London, 1788; _The Causes of the Great Numbers of Deaths ... in Putrid
Scarlet Fevers and Ulcerated Sore-Throats explained, etc._, London, 1793.
Based on the practice of the St Marylebone Infirmary.
[1320] James Sims, M.D. “Sketch of a Description of a Species of
Scarlatina Anginosa which occurred in the Autumn of 1798.” _Mem. Med. Soc.
Lond._ V. (1799), p. 415.
[1321] This is the source of Noah Webster’s information for London; he
adds that the “cat distemper” appeared in Philadelphia in June, and was
very fatal in New York and over the Northern States.
[1322] E. Peart, M.D., _Practical Information on the Malignant Scarlet
Fever and Sore-Throat_. London, 1802. See also _Med. and Phys. Journ._ IX.
16, report for Dec. 1802: “so very general that few of those who have
continued in the same house have entirely escaped it”; and the reports,
_ibid._ X. 76, 276.
[1323] Clark, u. s. Monteith, _Report of the Newcastle Dispensary from its
Foundation_, 1878.
[1324] Polwhele’s _Cornwall_. Part VII. _Diseases_, p. 59.
[1325] F. Skirmshire, _Med. Phys. Journ._ VI. 424.
[1326] R. Freeman, _ibid._ IX. 157.
[1327] H. Gilbert, _ibid._ IX. 249.
[1328] Goodwin, _ibid._ IX. 509.
[1329] Braithwaite, _ibid._ XI.
[1330] Willan, _Cutan. Dis._ 1808, p. 379, particulars from Dr Binns, with
full discussion of the methods of treatment. Willan was told by Dr Stanger
that there were 71 cases in the Foundling Hospital from June to October,
1804, with 4 deaths.
[1331] W. Blackburne, M.D., _Facts and Observations concerning the
Prevention and Cure of Scarlet Fever, &c._ London, 1803.
[1332] James Hamilton, M.D., _Obs. on the Utility, &c. of Purgative
Medicines_. 4th ed. Edin. 1811. App. III. p. 66 (three boys in Heriot’s
Hospital died of dropsy). Autenrieth, _Account of the State of Medicine in
Great Britain_. Extracts translated by Graves, u. i.
[1333] Ferriar, _Med. Hist. and Reflect_. III. 128.
[1334] R. J. Graves, M.D., _A System of Clinical Medicine_. Dublin, 1843,
p. 493.
[1335] T. Bateman, M.D., _Reports on the Diseases of London, and the State
of the Weather, from 1804 to 1816_. London, 1819.
[1336] Clarke, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XXX.
[1337] Goodwin, of Earlsoham, _Med. and Phys. Journ._ XXIV. 465.
[1338] Samuel Fothergill, M.D. _Med. and Phys. Journ._ XXXII. 481.
[1339] N. Bruce, _Med. Chir. Trans._ IX. 273.
[1340] Heysham to Joshua Milne, in the latter’s _Treatise on the Valuation
of Annuities_. Lond. 1815. App. p. 755.
[1341] Currie, _Med. Reports_, 1805, II. 458; Armstrong, _Pract. Illustr.
of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, &c._ Lond. 1818; Lodge, of Preston, in
_Med. and Phys. Journ._ XXXIII. (1815), p. 358.
[1342] W. Macmichael, M.D., _A New View of the Infection of Scarlet Fever,
&c._ London, 1822, pp. 30, 59, 78, 81-2. The title of another essay
appears to reflect the same ideas, _Caution to the Public, or hints upon
the nature of Scarlet Fever, designed to show that this disease arises
from a peculiar and absolute virus, and is specifically infectious in its
mildest as well as in its most malignant form_. By William Cooke, London,
1831.
[1343] Kreysig, “Ueber das Scharlachfieber,” _Hecker’s Annalen_, IV. 273,
401, 1826, says that scarlatina had been “not only almost uninterrupted in
all Europe since twenty-six or twenty-seven years [1799 or 1800], but also
frightfully fatal.” The period in which this was written appears to have
been one of fatal scarlatina in some parts of Germany; so also the years
1817-19, and the years 1799-1805 (as in Great Britain and Ireland). But
the sweeping assertion as to frightful scarlatina mortality in all Europe
without interruption since 1799 is clearly a flight of rhetoric, and is as
nearly as possible the reverse of the truth so far as concerns Britain and
Ireland.
[1344] Blackmore, _Lond. Med. Gaz._ VI. 114.
[1345] Sandwith, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XL. 249.
[1346] Aulsebrook, _Lancet_, 12 Nov. 1831, p. 217: cases of very malignant
suddenly fatal scarlatina in infants and young persons up to the age of
twenty-two. In the house of a canal boatman a son and two daughters, from
21 to 13 years, died in the course of two days after a very sudden and
brief illness.
[1347] Rumsey, _Trans. Prov. Med. Assoc._ III. 194.
[1348] Hamilton, _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ XXXIX. 140.
[1349] Cowan, _Journ. Statist. Soc._ III.
[1350] Sidey, Stark and others in _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ 1835-36.
H. Kennedy, M.D., _Account of the Epidemic of Scarlatina in Dublin from
1834 to 1842_. Dublin, 1843.
[1351] The principal epidemics of scarlatina which have been inquired into
by inspectors of the medical department since 1870 have been the
following:
In 1870, Camborne, Wing.
1873, Fleetwood-on-Wyre.
1874, Hetton (Durham).
1877, Massingham, Portsmouth.
1879, Pontypool, Easington (Durham), Fallowfield (near Manchester),
Yeadon.
1880, Bedlington (near Morpeth), Stourbridge, Swindon, Castleford,
Llanelly, Huntingdon, Barkingside (Orphans’ Home near Romford).
1881, Durham, Halifax, Thame.
1882, Bedwelty (Tredegar and Aberystruth), Potton.
1883, Sutton in Ashfield, Thorne, Donington and Moulton (Spalding).
1885, Sandal (near Wakefield).
1886, Atherton, Hayfield, Hindley, Wombwell.
1889, Spennymoor (Durham), Macclesfield, Faringdon, Brixham.
[1352] William Ogle, M.D., in the _49th Report of the Registrar-General_
(_for 1886_), p. xiv.
[1353] See a paper, with Tables, on “Age, Sex and Season in relation to
Scarlet Fever,” by Arthur Whitelegge, M.D. in _Trans. Epidemid. Soc._ N.
S. VII. p. 153, for Nottingham and some other towns. A paper by Dr
Ballard, “On the Prevalence and Fatality of Scarlatina as influenced by
Sex, Age and Season,” which was written twenty years before but left
unpublished, follows Whitelegge’s in the _Trans. Epidem. Soc._ N. S. VII.
(1887-8).
[1354] A table of figures showing this will be found in Dr B. A.
Whitelegge’s second lecture on “Changes of Type in Epidemic Diseases.”
_Brit. Med. Journ._ 4 March, 1893.
[1355] Longstaff, _Trans. Epid. Soc._ N. S. IV. (1880), 421, and _Studies
in Statistics_. London, 1891, p. 310. D. A. Gresswell, _Contribution to
the Natural History of Scarlatina_. Oxford, 1890, p. 193.
[1356] _Journ. Scot. Meteorol. Soc._ July, 1874, p. 195.
[1357] _Cutaneous Diseases._ Vol. I. 1808, p. 254.
[1358] An unfortunate event that came under the writer’s notice some years
ago may be illustrative of this. Two women with cancer of the breast were
operated on, the one after the other, in the same operating theatre. Their
beds were in the same hospital ward, but separated by the whole length of
the ward. A few days after the operations, one of the women developed
erysipelas, which was most extensive on the back; very soon after the
other woman got the disease in a precisely similar way; they both died of
it. As it seemed improbable that No. 1 had been infected in the ward, or
that No. 2 had been infected from No. 1, (some dozen surgical cases
between them escaping,) the suggestion arises of a common source of both
infections in the operating theatre. The operating table was covered by a
woollen cloth, of red colour so as not to show blood stains; it must have
contained a good deal of putrid invisible blood from former operations.
[1359] The first instance showing this came from a dairy at Hendon. See
James Cameron, M.D. _Trans. Epid. Soc._ V. (1885-6), p. 104; and _ibid._
VIII. 40. One of the latest and most fully investigated came from a dairy
near Glasgow, J. B. Russell, M.D., LL.D., and A. K. Chalmers, M.D. _Glas.
Med. Journ._ Jan. 1893, p. 1. An outbreak at Wimbledon and Merton is
described, _Rep. Med. Off. Loc. Gov. Bd._ for 1886, p. 327. See also
_ibid._ for 1882, p. 63. The scarlatina caused by cream (with
strawberries) is traced, _ibid._ for 1875, p. 72. A very clear case of
scarlatinal epidemic due to contaminated milk occurred at Blackheath, both
among children and adults, in April, 1894.
[1360] E. M. Crookshank, _Path. Trans._ XXXIX. 382, in an extensive
prevalence of cowpox on a dairy farm near Cricklade. No scarlatina could
be traced in the neighbourhood.
[1361] Alfred Carpenter, M.D. _Lancet_, 28 Jan. and 4 Feb. 1871.
[1362] Wall, _Gent. Magaz._ 1751, p. 71, 501. He quotes Severinus to the
effect that the great epidemic of _garrotillo_ in the province of Naples
in 1618 was preceded by a murrain.
[1363] Prince A. Morrow, “Drug Eruptions,” edited for the New Sydenham
Society by T. Colcott Fox, in _Selected Monographs on Dermatology_.
London, 1893.
[1364] Hirsch, III. 87.
[1365] Cullen, _First Lines of the Practice of Physic_, Part I., Book II.
chap. 5, § 2, and Book III. chap. 4.
[1366] _On Cutaneous Diseases_, vol. I., London, 1808, pp. 319, 326, 333.
He included also the _garrotillo_ of Spain and the throat-plague of Naples
(1618) among the “varieties of scarlatina,” inasmuch as they had not
unfrequently a rash which was of the erysipelatous kind. Hirsch (u. s.)
and Max Jaffe (“Die Diphtherie in epidemiologischer und nosologischer
Beziehung vornehmlich nach Französischen und Englischen Autoren
zusammengestellt,” Originalabhandlung in _Schmidt’s Jahrbücher_, CXIII.,
1862, pp. 97-120) do not seem to doubt the diphtheritic nature of the
_garrotillos_ of Spain and Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, but they
agree with Willan in classing most of the 18th century throat-distempers
of English and American writers as scarlatinal, reserving as diphtheritic,
or as more nearly allied to diphtheria, Starr’s “morbus strangulatorius”
of Cornwall, some cases of infants recorded by Denman (_supra_, p. 714),
Rumsey’s cases of “croup” (_supra_, p. 716), and the epidemic described by
Bard, of New York (_supra_, p. 690). These matters of identification
appear to be like matters of taste, for which the best rule is _non
disputandum_. I have already pointed out that Bard himself did not
hesitate to identify the epidemic throat-disease of his time with that
which Douglass had described in New England thirty years before.
[1367] P. Bretonneau, _Des inflammations spéciales du tissu muqueux et en
particulier de la Diphthérite_, Paris, 1826, with supplement in 1827.
[1368] Id. _Arch. gén. de méd._, Jan., 1855.
[1369] Mackenzie, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._, April, 1825, p. 294, and
_Med. Chir. Rev._, 1827, p. 289, for Glasgow in 1819. The disease which
Mackenzie called croup, was generally known in Glasgow at that time as
“croupy sore throat.” It was very fatal, attacking several children in the
same family, was reckoned contagious, was not a modification of
scarlatina, was very different from idiopathic croup as it began on the
tonsils and descended to the larynx and trachea, and, lastly, was
sometimes marked by gangrenous foetor.
Robertson, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ (1826) XXV. 279, for Kelso in
1825.
Bewley, _Dub. Journ. of Med. Sci._ VIII. 401, for Dublin in 1835-36. An
outbreak observed by Brown, at Haverfordwest, in 1849-50, involving some
200 cases and 40 deaths, was identified in 1858 with diphtheria (_Med.
Times and Gaz._, May, 1858, p. 566, see also _Med. Chir. Trans._ XL. 49).
Outbreaks more vaguely recalled in 1858 as diphtheria occurred at Ashford
in 1817, and at Leatherhead (30 deaths in the workhouse) at an uncertain
date (_2nd Rep._ (1859) _Med. Offices Privy Council_, pp. 244, 320). F.
Ryland, _Diseases and Injuries of the Larynx and Trachea_, London, 1837,
pp. 161-175, described a similar disease as a complication of measles at
Birmingham in 1835.
[1370] _Med. Times and Gazette_, _Lancet_, _British Med. Journal_, _&c._
for 1858 and 1859. See references in Hirsch, III. 89.
[1371] _Second Report_ (for 1859) _by the Medical Officer of the Privy
Council_, London, 1860, p. 161 _seq._ Dr Greenhow published an essay on
Diphtheria in 1860. Lectures important for the nosological definition were
published by Sir William Jenner in 1861 (reprinted in 1893). Other essays
called forth by the epidemic were by W. F. Wade (1858), Ernest Hart
(1859), Edward Copeman (Norwich, 1859). Christison, J. W. Begbie and
others wrote upon it in Scotland.
[1372] Mr Jones, of Fletching, Sussex, wrote that scores of cases
(probably at least 50 or 60) have had more or less eruption. In one case
it was general and bright.... It was like scarlatina ... but the whole
surface was covered with minute miliary vesicles of clear fluid, ‘one mass
of small vesications.’ There was a great deal of itching and no subsequent
dropsy. In other cases the eruption was partial. _Rep. Med. Off. Privy
Council_, II. (1859), p. 284.
[1373] Starr’s description for 1748 is referred to _supra_, p. 695.
Sanderson, _Report_, u. s. p. 263, says of the disease in 1858: “At
Launceston the diphtheritic pellicle was tough, leathery, and highly
elastic; and on the mucous surface of the fauces and pharynx it attained
so great thickness (from one-tenth to one-eighth of an inch) that it was
compared by several practitioners to the coriaceous lichens which grow on
rotten bark. In the other districts this was never observed.”
[1374] G. B. Longstaff, M.D., “The Geographical Distribution of Diphtheria
in England and Wales,” in _Supplement to the 17th Annual Report of Loc.
Gov. Board_, 1887-8, p. 135. See also Downes, _Trans. Epid. Soc._ N. S.
VII. 193. Farr, _Rep. Reg. Genl._ for 1874, p. 219, gave the following
illustration: “It is remarkable that of diphtheria, out of the same number
born, more die in the healthy districts of England than in Liverpool; the
proportions are 1029 in the healthy districts and 442 in Liverpool of
100,000 born. The deaths from scarlet fever are 2140 in the healthy
districts to 3830 in Liverpool.”
[1375] _8th Detailed Report of the Reg. Gen. Scot._, p. xxxix.
[1376] R. T. Thorne, M.B., _Diphtheria: its Natural History and
Prevention_. Milroy Lectures for 1891. London, 1891.
[1377] Farr, _Rep. Reg.-Genl._ XXIV. (1861), p. 217.
[1378] Longstaff, u. s.
[1379] G. Budd, M.D., “Obs. on Typhoid or Intestinal Fever.” _Brit. Med
Journ._, 9 Nov. 1861, p. 485.
[1380] _Supra_, pp. 210, 213.
[1381] Matthew A. Adams, cited by Thorne, u. s. with diagram.
[1382] M. W. Taylor, M.D., “Diphtheria in connection with Damp and Mould
Fungi.” _Trans. Epic. Soc._ N. S. VI. (1886-7), p. 104. Thorne, u. s.
gives instances in which diphtheria seemed to choose out wet and
impervious soils.
[1383] L. Traube, _Gesammelte Beiträge, &c._, Berlin, 1871, II. 11.
[1384] Thorne, u. s. has collected and analysed very fully the instances
of diphtherial epidemics traced to cows’ milk. It is commonly assumed that
the epidemics are either wholly diphtherial or wholly scarlatinal, but not
a mixture of the two diseases.
[1385] W. N. Thursfield, _Lancet_, 3 Aug. 1878, p. 180, has contended for
some such correlation between diphtheria and enteric fever in their
respective preferences, at that time, for rural and urban districts.
[1386] William Heberden, M.D. junior. _Observations on the Increase and
Decrease of Diseases, particularly the Plague._ Lond. 1801.
[1387] Among the numerous medical writers who have used it are Macmichael,
Watson and Chevers. Among historians Lecky (I. 573) has thought it worthy
of mention among the progressive improvements of the 18th century.
[1388] Heberden (l. c. p. 42) accounted for the enormous increase of the
article “convulsions” in the Bills by the inclusion under that term of
most of the deaths originally entered under “chrisomes and infants,” which
were infants under one month. But the latter had been mostly transferred
at an early period while convulsions was still a small total; and even at
the worst period of the public health in London, about 1730-40, they would
not have accounted for a sixth part of the deaths under convulsions. The
probability of the deaths from “griping in the guts” having been
transferred to “convulsions” was pointed out in a review of Heberden’s
essay in the _British Critic_ on its appearance, without reasons given
such as I adduce in the sequel.
[1389] _Observ. Med._ IV. cap. 7, § 2.
[1390] _Ibid._ III. cap. 2, § 54.
[1391] _Pathol. Cerebri._ Pordage’s Transl. p. 25.
[1392] Walter Harris, M.D., _Tractatus de Morbis Acutis Infantum_. Lond.
1689. Engl. Transl. by Cockburn, 1693, p. 39.
[1393] _Obs. Med._ IV. cap. 2, § 7: “haud aliter ac si in aëre peculiaris
mensis hujus [Augusti] lateat reconditum ac peculiare quiddam, quod
specificam hujus modi alterationem, soli huic morbo adaptatam, vel cruori
vel ventriculi fermento valeat imprimere.”
[1394] See the reference to Simpson’s essay, _supra_, p. 333.
[1395] W. Fordyce, M.D. _A new inquiry into the Causes, Symptoms and Cure
of Putrid and Inflammatory Fevers: with an Appendix on the Hectic Fever
and on the Ulcerated and Malignant Sore Throat._ London, 1773, p. 207.
[1396] See the Representation of the College of Physicians on Drink in
1726, cited at p. 84.
[1397] Joseph Clarke, M.D. “Nine-day Fits in the Lying-in Hospital of
Dublin.” _Trans. Royal Irish Academy_ (in _Med. Facts and Obs._ III.
1792).
[1398] Moss, u. s. He makes out that the infants of the poorer class were
much neglected by their drunken parents.
[1399] John Ferriar, M.D., _Medical Histories and Reflections_. 2 vols.
Lond. 1810. II. 213 seq. “On the Prevention of Fevers in Great Towns.”
[1400] Watt, u. s., says that “bowel-hive” at Glasgow included, along with
teething, “a promiscuous mass which may be considered nearly in the same
light as the great number of deaths in the London bills of mortality
ranked under the terms convulsions, gripes of the guts, &c.... If the
patient dies in a state of convulsions, this, we are told, is owing to the
hives having gone in about the heart, or their having seized the bowels.”
[1401] Hirsch, _Geographical and Historical Pathology_, Engl. Transl. III.
376.
[1402] Supplement to the 45th Annual Report of the Registrar-General.
London, 1885, p. xiii. Ballard, following the method of Pfeiffer (1871)
for Asiatic cholera, has shown that the correspondence is closest with the
temperature of the ground four feet deep.
[1403] Ballard, _Report to the Local Government Board upon the Causation
of Summer Diarrhoea_, 1889, p. 32.
[1404] Willis mentions an instance (_Pathol. Cerebri_, Pordage’s transl.
p. 25) which can hardly mean anything but congenital feebleness as a cause
of infantile convulsions. A neighbour of his (in St Martin’s Lane) had
lost all his children by convulsions within the space of three months.
Another child was born, and Willis was sent for to advise what regimen
should be followed so as to save it from the same fate.
[1405] This is clearly seen in comparing ages at death in Liverpool, and
in Preston or Salford. Again in the ten years 1871-80, there were 4530
deaths from diarrhoea in the group of shipping towns, Yarmouth, Hull (with
Sculcoates), Goole and Hartlepool, of which 70 per cent. were under one
year, 19 per cent. from one to five, and 11 per cent. above five, chiefly
in old age. In the group of Leicester, Worcester, Northampton and Coventry
in the same period, there were 5001 deaths, of which 74 per cent. were
under one year, 17 per cent. from one to five, and 9 per cent. above five,
chiefly in old age.
[1406] Ballard, _Report, &c._ u. s. says that “occupation of females from
home,” which had been often assigned by medical officers of health and
others as a fruitful cause of infantile fatal diarrhoea, “resolves itself
mainly into the question of maternal neglect, with the substitution more
or less of artificial feeding for feeding at the breast.” Tatham, _Brit.
Med. Journ._ 1892, II. 277, is of opinion that the rate of infant
mortality was considerably increased by the practice, which obtained in
most manufacturing towns, of allowing women to return to work within a
week or ten days after their confinement, so that the duties of the mother
were necessarily delegated. The paper by Dr G. Reid, _ibid._ p. 275, which
called forth that and similar opinions as to the kind of maternal neglect
that favoured the mortality by infantile diarrhoea, bore the title, “Legal
restraint upon the employment of women in factories before and after
childbirth”; but the emphasis falls almost wholly upon restraint of the
mother’s industrial occupation after the child is born.
[1407] L. c. pp. 43-45.
[1408] Ballard, u. s. Table VI.
[1409] See former volume, p. 412.
[1410] _The Triall of Tabacco, &c._ by E. G. [Edmund Gardiner], Gent. and
Practicioner in Physicke. London, 1610, fol. II.
[1411] _Obs. Med._ IV. cap. 2.
[1412] _Ibid._ IV. cap. 7.
[1413] Dr Andrew Wilson, a pupil of the Edinburgh School in the great
period of the first Monro, Whytt and Rutherford, used his Newcastle
experiences in 1758 and following years as the basis of two excellent
essays, one on Dysentery (1761) and the other upon Autumnal Disorders of
the Bowels (1765). In the latter he includes both cholera nostras and
bilious colic, (as well as dry colic) as Sydenham had done, and makes the
following distinction between the two forms, which “are very nearly allied
in their nature”:--“The vomiting of bile in the cholera is not so early as
it is in the other; neither is it so constant, nor in so large quantities.
Though a purging generally attends the bilious colic, yet it does not
correspond so regularly as it does in the cholera, in which there
generally is a call to stool soon after every paroxysm of vomiting.... The
bilious colic is not generally so quickly hazardous as the cholera is. The
intervals between the sick fits are often longer, and when it is attended
with danger, it does not become so so suddenly as the cholera does.”
Bilious colic was not so strictly an autumnal complaint as cholera. It was
not so soon relieved by medicines. It resembled cholera in the remarkable
character of exciting cramps in other muscles than the abdominal.
[1414] _Pharmaceutice rationalis._
[1415] Appendix to _Essay on Smallpox_, 1740.
[1416] _Gent. Magaz._, Sept. 1751, p. 398.
[1417] _Two Papers on Fever and Infection_, 1763, p. 35.
[1418] _Med. Hist. and Reflect._ II. 220.
[1419] _Ed. Med. Surg. Journ._, 1807.
[1420] Charles Turner Thackrah, _Cholera, its character and treatment,
with remarks on the identity of the Indian and English_. Leeds, 1832, p.
24.
[1421] W. Horsley, _Med. Phys. Journ._ 24 March, 1832, p. 270.
[1422] _Geogr. and Histor. Path._ Engl. transl. III. 315.
[1423] It is probable that the association of surfeit with bowel-complaint
in general and at length with dysentery in particular came from the
popular belief that these maladies of the autumnal season were due to
repletion with fruit. That was the popular belief from an early period,
which nearly all the medical writers on autumnal diarrhoea and dysentery
took occasion to combat as either inadequate or erroneous.
[1424] See Vol. 1. of this History, p. 626. The following is in a letter
from Charles Bertie to Viscountess Campden, London, 22 Nov. 1681: “I have
safely received your choice present of four bottles, three of Plague and
the other of Surfeit water, which I shall preserve against the occasion,
being confident that better are not made with hands.” _Cal. Belvoir MSS._
(Hist. MSS. Com.) II. 60.
[1425] _Obs. Med._ IV. cap. 3.
[1426] _Pharmaceutice Rationalis_, lib. III. cap. 3.
[1427] _Supra_, p. 103.
[1428] Andrew Fletcher, _Two Discourses, &c._ No. 2. p. 2, 1698.
[1429] John Jones, M.D., _De Morbis Hibernorum specialim vero de
Dysenteria Hibernica. Accesserunt nonnulla de Dysenteria Epidemica_.
Inaug. Diss. Trin. Col. Dub. Londini, 1698, p. 12.
[1430] _Edin. Med. Essays and Obs._ I. (1733) 37, II. 30, IV. V.
[1431] James Stephen, surgeon to Gen. Whetham’s regiment, in Pringle’s
collection of accounts of the “Success of the vitrum Antimonii ceratum.”
_Ibid._ V. pt. 2, p. 179, 4th ed.
[1432] Professor T. Simpson, of St Andrews, Andrew Brown, of Dalkeith,
John Paisley and John Gordon, of Glasgow. _Ibid._
[1433] _Gent. Magaz._, 1741, p. 705.
[1434] The “epidemic constitution” of 1743 was so markedly dysenteric
after the influenza in the spring that Huxham regarded the dysentery as a
sequela of the influenza.
[1435] Mark Akenside, M.D., _De Dysenteria Commentarius_, London, 1764.
[1436] George Baker, M.D., _De Catarrho et de Dysenteria Londinensi
Epidemicis utrisque An._ MDCCLXII. _Libellus_, Lond., 1764.
[1437] William Watson, M.D., in _Phil. Trans._ LII. pt. 2 (1762), p. 647.
[1438] Pringle also, who was well acquainted with the dysentery of
campaigns, speaks of the London epidemic as an exceptional occurrence, and
as having caused few deaths.
[1439] _Med. Obs. and Inquiries_, IV. (1771), p. 153.
[1440] MS. Infirmary Book of the Foundling Hospital.
[1441] _An Essay on the Autumnal Dysentery._ By a physician (Andrew
Wilson, M.D.), Lond., 1761 (Preface dated Newcastle, 25 March, 1760), pp.
1, 23.
[1442] _Trans. K. and Q. Col. Phys._ V. (1828), p. 221.
[1443] _Obs. on the History and Treatment of Dysentery and its
Combinations, etc._, 2nd ed., Dublin, 1847.
[1444] _Alexandri Tralliani Medici libri duodecim._ Basil, 1556, Lib.
VIII. pp. 423, 432.
[1445] Akenside, _l. c._ “Ut dysenteriam jam pro rheumatismo intestinorum
habeam, et similem utriusque morbi causam et materiem esse contendimus.”
[1446] Hirsch, III. 333 (Eng. transl.): “As to the influence of an extreme
diurnal range of the thermometer (cold nights after very hot days) there
is almost complete agreement among the observers in those parts [tropical
and subtropical] of the world.”
[1447] I have enunciated this view of the pathology of acute rheumatism
more fully in the Article “Pathology” in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.
[1448] _Lond. Med. Journal._ Editorial note, II. 211. The parish register
of Finchley shows double the average mortality in 1780, and indicates
dysentery as a fatal malady. Lysons, _Environs of London_.
[1449] Moss, u. s.
[1450] Francis Geach, F.R.S., _Some Observations on the present Epidemic
Dysentery_, 1781.
[1451] Dennis Ryan, M.D., “Remittent Fever of the West Indies.” _Lond.
Med. Journ._ II. 253, iii. 63.
[1452] Dr Livingston to Dr Lettsom, Aberdeen, 29 June, 1789, in _Memoirs
of Lettsom_, III.
[1453] Willan, _Report on the Diseases etc._, p. 42. The nearest approach
to a fatality in dysentery, he says, happened in the case of a lady
residing in Spa Fields, at whose window a brown owl, attracted by the
solitary light, came flapping and hooting at midnight, to the great
aggravation of the patient’s symptoms.
[1454] Bateman, u. s.
[1455] _Glasg. Med. Journ._ IV. (1831), pp. 5, 229.
[1456] Cheyne, _Dubl. Hosp. Reports_, III. (1822), p. 3. At Limerick, from
June to September, 1821, there were 47 cases among the men of the 79th
regiment.
[1457] Clarke, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ IV. 423.
[1458] A. C. Hutchinson, _Statement of the extraordinary sickness at the
Penitentiary at Milbank_, Lond. 1823; P. M. Latham, M.D., _Account of the
Disease lately prevalent at the General Penitentiary_. Lond. 1825.
[1459] James Wilson, _Glasgow Med. Journ._ I. (1828), p. 40.
[1460] James Wilson, _Glasgow Med. Journ._ I. 39; James Brown, _ibid._;
Macfarlane, I. 99; Paterson, I. 438; Editors, IV. 1; Hume (Hamilton), IV.
14, and 229; McDerment (Ayr), IV. 19; Macnab (Callander), IV. 241.
[1461] Christison, “Notice on the Dysentery which has lately prevailed in
the Edinburgh Infirmary.” _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ XXXI. (Jan. 1829), p.
216, and in _Life of Sir Robert Christison_, “Autobiography,” I. 376.
[1462] W. H. Gilby, M.D., “On the Dysentery which occurred in the
Wakefield Lunatic Asylum in the years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829.” _North
of Eng. Med. and Surg. Journ._ I. (1830-31), 91.
[1463] Hume, “Case of the Edinburgh New Town Epidemic.” _Glasgow Med.
Journ._ IV. 229.
[1464] _Ibid._ IV. 7. The following is Buchanan’s reference to it: “The
only epidemic fever belonging to the family of diseases we are here
considering that occurred in Scotland during the _dysenteric_ years was
that of the New Town of Edinburgh, in 1828, of which we have already
spoken. As our knowledge of this fever is not derived from any source on
which we can certainly rely, it is possible that we may have formed an
erroneous opinion respecting it; but from all we have heard of its
symptoms and mode of distribution, we are disposed to consider it as
totally different in nature from the common fever of this country. The
latter circumstance alone, the mode of distribution of the disease, is, we
think, perfectly sufficient to demonstrate our proposition. Instead of
occupying the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, and the High Street, the usual
haunts of typhus, this fever had its head-quarters in Heriot Row and Great
King Street; and, according to our information, it extended from the last
mentioned street in the direction of the Water of Leith, and from Leith,
along the shore, to Musselburgh. We do not vouch for the accuracy of these
minute details, but we believe the important fact to be beyond doubt that
this fever prevailed chiefly, not in the districts where typhus is
invariably to be met with, but in the most fashionable parts of the New
Town.”
[1465] James Black, M.D., _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ XLV. (1836), p. 63.
“As the epidemic was ushered in and was accompanied during the half of its
course with cholera, fever of a typhous character followed close in its
train among the working and lower classes, and continued more or less
during the first months of winter, after dysentery had totally
disappeared.” The latter had not been seen again down to 1835.
[1466] J. Smith, _ibid._ XLII. (1833), p. 342.
[1467] Cleland, _Trans. Glasg. and Clydesd. Statist. Soc._ I. 1837.
[1468] Arrott, _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._, Jan. 1839, p. 121.
[1469] Farr, in _First Report of the Registrar-General_, 1837-8, p. 103.
[1470] Baly, _Pathology and Treatment of Dysentery_. London, 1847.
[1471] Moyle, _Lond. Med. Gaz._ N. S. VII. Dec. 29, 1848, p. 1093.
[1472] Christison, “On a local Epidemic of Dysentery.” _Month. Journ. Med.
Sc._ XVII. (Dec. 1853), 508.
[1473] T. S. Clouston, _Med. Times and Gaz._ 1865, I. 567.
[1474] W. H. Duncan, M.D., “On the recent Introduction of Fever into
Liverpool by the crew of an Egyptian frigate.” _Trans. Epidemiol. Soc._
vol. 1. pt. 2. p. 246. (1 July, 1861).
[1475] James Boyle, surgeon to H. M. S. ‘Minden,’ _Epidemic Cholera of
India_, London, 1821; W. B. Carter, _Cholera Indica vel Spasmodica_,
Thesis, Glasgow, 1822; Thomas Brown, of Musselburgh, _On Cholera, more
especially as it has appeared in British India_, Edin. 1824; Whitelaw
Ainslie, M.D., _The Cholera Morbus of India_, Letter to the Court of
Governors, H. E. I. C., Edin. 1825; A. T. Christie, M.D. (of Madras),
_Obs. on the Nature and Treatment of Cholera_, Edin. 1828; Charles Searle
(of Madras), _Cholera, its Nature, Cause and Treatment_, London, 1830
(dated 1st May, instigated, not by the Orenburg epidemic, but by the
deaths of Sir Thomas Monro and others from cholera in Madras).
[1476] See extract in _Glas. Med. Journ._, Feb. 1831, p. 105, from
_Scottish Mission. and Philan. Reg._
[1477] George Hamilton Bell, _Treatise on Cholera Asphyxia or Epidemic
Cholera as it appeared in Asia and more recently in Europe_, Edin. 1831;
Reginald Orton, _An Essay on the Epidemic Cholera of India_, 2nd. ed. with
a supplement, London, 1831 (August); 1st ed. Madras, 1820; H. Young, M.D.
(of the Bengal Service), _Remarks on the Cholera Morbus_, 2nd ed. 1831;
Alex. Smith, M.D. (Calcutta), _Description of the Spasmodic Cholera_
(substance of an old report to the Army Medical Board); W. Macmichael,
M.D., _Is the Cholera Spasmodica of India a Contagious Disease?_ London,
1831 (Sept.); T. J. Pettigrew, _Obs. on Cholera, comprising a description
of the Epidemic Cholera of India_, London, 1831 (13 Nov.); John Austin,
_Cholera Morbus, Indian and Russian Cholera_, London, 1831 (July); John
Goss, late H. E. I. C. S., _Practical Remarks on the Disease called
Cholera_, London, 1831 (Nov.); Whitelaw Ainslie, _Letters on the Cholera_,
London, 1832 (from Edinburgh, Dec. 1831); Henry Penneck, M.D., _Nature and
Treatment of the Indian Pestilence commonly called Cholera_, London, 1831
(Penzance, 24 Nov.); A. P. Wilson Philip, _Nature of Malignant Cholera_,
London, 1832; _Official Reports made to Government by Drs Russell and
Barry on Cholera Spasmodica observed during the Mission to Russia in
1831_, London, 1832; John V. Thompson, Dep. Insp. Gen. of Hosps. _The
Pestilential Cholera unmasked_, Cork, 1832 (January).
[1478] _Op. cit._ p. 469.
[1479] _Lond. Med. Gaz._ 1831.
[1480] James Hall, “Narrative of an Epidemic English Cholera that appeared
on board ships of war lying in ordinary in the River Medway during the
Summer and Autumn of 1831.” _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._, Feb. 1832, p. 295.
[1481] John Marshall, M.D., _Obs. on Cholera as it appeared at Port
Glasgow in July and August, 1831. Illustrated by numerous cases._ 1831.
[1482] William Dixon, _Lond. Med. Gaz._ 4 Feb. 1832, IX. 668.
[1483] Dixon, u. s.
[1484] Kell, p. 22.
[1485] Kell, Dixon, and others; the statements about Henry’s case are
contradictory.
[1486] Clanny, p. 19.
[1487] A table of the daily course of the cholera at Sunderland, which I
must omit for want of space, is given in the essay by Haslewood and
Morbey, _History and Medical Treatment of Cholera as it appeared in
Sunderland in 1831_, London, 1832, p. 151.
[1488] Kell, however, suspected that there were many malignant cases in
Monk Wearmouth after the 31st of October, which were not reported. l. c.
p. 73.
[1489] Clanny says (p. 42), “At first our epidemic appeared only in
certain streets or lanes, namely, the Fish Landing, Long Bank, Silver
Street, High Street, Burleigh Street, Mill Hill, Sailors’ Alley, Love
Lane, Wood Street, Warren Street; as also in several lanes in
Bishopwearmouth, the New Town, Ayre’s Quay, and on the north side of the
river in Monkwearmouth, in several of the byelanes near the river....
Generally speaking the disease fixed its residence in such places as
medical men could have pointed out _à priori_.”
[1490] Besides the essay of Haslewood and Morbey, and the paper by Dixon,
_supra_, the following were written on the Sunderland cholera: W.
Ainsworth, _Obs. on the Pestilential Cholera at Sunderland_, London, 1832;
John Butler Kell, surgeon to the 82nd Regt., _Cholera at Sunderland in
1831_, Edin. 1834; W. Reid Clanny, M.D., (chairman of the Local Board of
Health), _Hyperanthraxis, or the Cholera of Sunderland_, Lond. 1832; Emile
Dubuc, _Rapport sur le Cholera Morbus à Sunderland, Newcastle, etc._
Rouen, 1832.
[1491] Ainsworth, p. 164, u. s., says: “Dennis Mc Gwin, who took the
disease to North Shields, came from Sunderland. The first case in South
Shields was a boy from Gateshead. A pedler woman took it to Houghton, a
traveller to Morpeth, and I have no doubt its arrival could similarly be
traced to Durham, Haddington and Tranent, all towns on the same high road.
A wanderer also perished of the disease at Doncaster; but luckily there
were no other cases.”
[1492] T. M. Greenhow, M.D., _Cholera as it has recently appeared in the
Towns of Newcastle and Gateshead, including Cases_, London, 1832; Thomas
Mollison, M.D., _Remarks on the epidemic Disease called Cholera, as it
occurred in Newcastle_, Edin. 1832. (He arrived at Newcastle from
Edinburgh on the 21st Dec. and remained eleven days.)
[1493] In Greenhow, u. s.
[1494] Craigie, _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._ XXXVII. 337.
[1495] John Douglas, M.D., “History of the Epidemic Cholera of Hawick,” in
_Cholera Gazette_, no. 6, April 7, p. 234.
[1496] Chiefly from the paper by Professor George Watt, _Glas. Med.
Journ._ v. 298, 384; see also Bryce, _ibid._ 262.
[1497] W. Auchincloss, M.D., “Report of the Epidemic Cholera as it
appeared in the Town’s Hospital of Glasgow in February and March, 1832,”
_Glas. Med. Journ._ v. 113.
[1498] James Cleland, LL.D., and James Corkindale, M.D., _Edin. Med. Surg.
Journ._ XXXIX. 503.
[1499] J. Adair Lawrie, M.D., “Report of the Albion Street Cholera
Hospital.” _Glas. Med. Journ._ V. 309, 416.
[1500] _Month. Journ. Med. Sc._ March, 1850, p. 302.
[1501] Wood, _Glas. Med. Journ._ VI. 1833.
[1502] Grieve, _Month. Journ. Med. Sc._ IX. 1849, p. 777.
[1503] Scott, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XXXIX. 276. For a whole month
it was confined to one suburb. All the earlier cases were without
exception fatal. There were 130 cases and 65 deaths.
[1504] It is probably to Portmahomak or Inver that Howison refers in the
following (_Lancet_, 10 Nov. 1832, p. 203): Cholera broke out in a small
village several miles from Tain, and in a few days it carried off 41 out
of a population of 120 to 140. Coffins could not be made fast enough. Many
were buried in sailcloth. The people fled from their houses to the fields.
[1505] Hugh Miller, _My Schools and Schoolmasters_, Chap. XXII.
[1506] The good account by Paterson, “Observations on Cholera as it
appeared at Collieston and Footdee,” _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XLIX.
(1838), p. 408, shows how much panic a mortality of nine stood for.
[1507] Sir J. Y. Simpson gave to Dr Graves of Dublin a list of some places
in Scotland where cholera had appeared, which contains the additional
names of Helmsdale (23 July), Fort William (24 Sept.), Fort George (7
May), Islay (23 Oct.), Portpatrick (7 Aug.), Crieff (2 Oct.), and Kelso
(29 Oct.).
[1508] _Dubl. Journ. Med. Sc._ III. 74.
[1509] _Times_, 1 July, 1832.
[1510] Simon McCoy, “Notes on Malignant Cholera as it appeared in Dublin,”
_Dub. Journ. Med. Sc._ II. 357, and III. 1.
[1511] Compare Grimshaw’s observations on the admissions for fever to the
Cork Street Hospital in the summer of 1864, _supra_, p. 298.
[1512] Wilde, _Census of Ireland 1841_. Table of Deaths, p. xxi.
[1513] _Gent. Magaz._ 1832, June, p. 555; _Annual Register_, 1832,
Chronicle (June), p. 71.
[1514] Graves, _Dubl. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc._ Feb. 1849, p. 31, from
information by Dr Little of Sligo.
[1515] W. Howison, M.D., of Edinburgh, _Lancet_, 10 Nov. 1832, p. 203. He
was at Londonderry in August, and had probably heard the reports of the
Sligo cholera there.
[1516] John Colvan, M.D., _Dubl. Journ. Med. Sc._ IV. 186. These five
deaths in Armagh County in 1833 do not appear in the table.
[1517] Graves, u. s. 1849, VII. 246.
[1518] Roupell, _Croomian Lectures on Cholera_, Lond. 1833, p. 33, gives
the suspicious case of a man named Webster, who sailed from Sunderland on
20 Jan. and arrived in the Thames about the 30th. “The vessel immediately
obtained _pratique_; but a few days after, this man was seized with
extreme pain in the epigastrium” &c. and died suddenly after symptoms in
part those of cholera. Postmortem, 20 oz. of blood were found in the
peritoneum, and some blood in the lower part of the bowel.
[1519] The populous parishes of the Black Country around Wolverhampton
came under notice in another way in 1832 as a crucial instance in the
redistribution of seats by the Reform Act.
[1520] T. Ogier Ward, “Cholera in Wolverhampton in Aug.-Oct. 1832,”
_Trans. Prov. Med. and Surg. Assoc._ II. 368.
[1521] Rev. W. Leigh, _An authentic narrative of the awful visitation of
Bilston by Cholera in Aug.-Sept. 1832_. Wolverhampton, 1833.
[1522] Rev. C. Girdlestone, _Seven Sermons preached during the prevalence
of the Cholera in the parish of Sedgley, with a narrative of that
visitation_. London, 1833.
[1523] T. Ogier Ward, u. s., p. 376.
[1524] James Collins, M.D., _Lond. Med. Gaz._ 30 June, 1832, p. 412; and
report by Thompson, surgeon of the ‘Brutus,’ in the _Cholera Gazette_, s.
d.
[1525] Henry Gaulter, M.D., _The Origin and Progress of the Malignant
Cholera in Manchester_. London, 1833, p. 113.
[1526] The first case was of a coach-painter, who had had frequent attacks
of painter’s colic. Opposite his house was a large stable dunghill in a
very foetid state. On the evening of the 16th May he had eaten a heavy
supper of lambs’ fry, and had been ill thereafter, the symptoms becoming
those of Asiatic cholera on the night of the 18th, death ensuing at 2 p.m.
20th.
[1527] In the hamlet adjoining a cotton-mill at Hinds, near Bury,
consisting of thirty cottages in a row between the mill lade and the
canal, wretchedly built, without chimneys, with windows that would not
open, the inmates sleeping four or five in a bed, there were 32 cases of
cholera with 7 deaths, but none of these were in persons who worked in the
mill. Gaulter, u. s. citing Goodlad. He cites also Flint, of Stockport,
for the rarity of attacks among the mill workers in that town. See also
Samuel Gaskell, “Malignant Cholera in Manchester,” _Edin. Med. and Surg.
Journ._ XL. 52. The microbic theory, or, as it was then called by Sir
Henry Holland and others, the “hypothesis of insect life,” was happily
thought of by a working cotton-spinner in Manchester to explain the
immunity of the mill-workers in 1832. Gaulter (u. s. p. 120) gives in
correct English what would probably have been said in the vernacular as
follows: “I’ve been thinkin’, Maister,” said a spinner to Mr Sowden,
millowner, “as how th’ cholery comes o’ hinsecks that smo’ as we corn’d
see ’em, an’ they corn’d live i’ factories for th’ ’eät and th’ ile. Me
an’ my mates wor speakin’ o’t last neet, an’ we o’ on us thowt th’ saäm
thing.” Hahnemann, cited by the _Times_, 17 July, 1831, believed that the
cholera insect escaped from the eye, and fastened upon the hair, skin,
clothes, &c. of other persons. The common microscopic objects uniformly
found in the choleraic discharges by later observers have been vibrios, of
which half-a-dozen, or perhaps a dozen, varieties have been distinguished.
One of these was somewhat audaciously named the “cholera germ” or “comma
bacillus of cholera” by Dr R. Koch, who went to Calcutta in 1884. All
vibrios, which have a corkscrew form when in motion, are apt to assume the
comma form when at rest.
[1528] _Times_, Sept. 5, 1832.
[1529] John Addington Symonds, “Progress and Causes of Cholera in Bristol,
1832.” _Trans. Prov. Med. Surg. Assoc._ III. 170.
[1530] Some cases were detailed by Edward Blackman, M.D., _Lond. Med.
Gaz._ 1832, pp. 473, 546.
[1531] Thomas Shapter, M.D., _The History of the Cholera in Exeter in
1832_. London, 1849, pp. 297.
[1532] Besides the papers or books already cited, accounts were published
for the following places: Warrington, by Mr Glazebrook, secretary to the
Local Board of Health; Oxford, by Rev. V. Thomas; Hull, by James Alderson,
M.D.; Kendal, by Thomas Proudfoot, M.D. (_Edin. Med. and Surg. J._ XXXIX.
85); various places by J. Y. Simpson, M.D. (_ibid._ XLIX. 358); Tynemouth,
by E. H. Greenhow, M.D. (_Trans. Epid. Soc._ 1861); London, by Halma-Grand
(_Relation_ etc. Paris, 1832), and by Gaselee and Tweedie (Lond. 1832).
There are also various minor notices: for Whittlesea (_Lond. Med. Gaz._ I.
1832, p. 448), Hutton, Yorkshire (_ibid._ II. 1832, p. 316), York
(_Lancet_, 13 Oct. 1832, p. 72), Cheltenham, showing how it was kept free
(_ibid._ Nov. 10, p. 210), St Heliers, Jersey (_Lond. Med. Surg. J._ II.
359), Derby (_ibid._ 11. 383).
[1533] The daily mortality in Paris at the beginning of the epidemic was
as follows (_Annual Register_, 1832, p. 318):
Days Cholera
deaths
March 27-31 98
April 1 79
2 168
3 212
4 242
5 351
6 416
7 582
8 769
9 861
10 848
11 769
12 768
13 816
14 692
15 567
16 572
To the 16th of April the deaths were about 8700; before the end of the
month the total was nearly doubled. As the whole cholera mortality of
Paris in 1832 was about 19,000, April must have had much the greater part
of it.
[1534] Proudfoot, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ XXXIX. 99.
[1535] Graves, who was a strong contagionist (l. c. 1848-49), cites the
instances of nuns, nurses and porters at Tuam, and of medical men at
Sligo.
[1536] G. D. Dermott, lecturer in Anatomy and Surgery, _Lond. Med. and
Surg. Journ._ 1832, p. 274.
[1537] John Parkin, surgeon H.E.I.C.S., “Cause, Nature and Treatment of
Cholera.” _Lond. Med. and Surg. Journ._ 1 Sept. 1832.
[1538] Graves, _Clinical Medicine_, 1843, p. 700: “I could bring forward
the names of many medical men in Dublin whose lives, I am happy to say,
were saved by the use of this remedy.”
[1539] Paterson, u. s. for the fishing village of Collieston,
Aberdeenshire: “In most instances where the lancet was used at the proper
period little else was required. The patient, although in an apparently
hopeless state at the time of my visit, was in these instances not
unfrequently in the course of twenty-four hours out of danger.”
[1540] A correspondent of the _Lond. Med. Gaz._ Sept. 1832, p. 731, dating
from Warrington, proved by a statistical arrangement of 103 cases of
cholera, that the saline treatment was nearly certain recovery, that the
same combined with blood-letting was certain recovery, that blood-letting
alone was certain death, and that opium with stimulants, and Morison’s
pill, were each uniformly followed by a fatal result.
Cases Deaths Percentage
of recoveries
Aged, neglected or seen too late 30 30 0
Obstinately refused medicine 4 4 0
Treated by opium and stimulants 23 23 0
" by Morison’s pill 3 3 0
" by blood-letting 13 13 0
" by blood-letting and salines 7 0 100
" by salines alone 23 2 92·3
--- -- ---
103 75 27 per cent.
[1541] _Quarterly Review_, CXVIII. 256.
[1542] Reported by Brewster to J. Y. Simpson, _Edin. Med. Surg. Journ._
XLIX. (1838), p. 368.
[1543] _Glas. Med. Journ._ VI. (1833), p. 366. Stark says, perhaps for
Edinburgh, that cholera recurred in the end of 1833 and beginning of 1834,
with a high degree of fatality.
[1544] Edmond Sharkey, M.B., _Dubl. J. Med. Sc._ XVI. 13. Of 28 houses or
cabins (nearly all in three hamlets) which together had 76 cases, 16
cabins had each two cases, 8 had each three, 1 had four, 2 had each five,
and 1 had six. The type of sickness was the same as in 1832-33.
[1545] R. Green, M.D., _Lancet_, 14 April, 1838, p. 83: true Asiatic
cholera began at Youghal in the second week of December, 1837, and lasted
two months, about 200 having been attacked: “two of my relatives, Miss A.
---- and Mrs K. ----, died in December of cholera, one in fourteen hours,
the other in ten hours.”
[1546] Deaths from Cholera in the Coventry House of Industry:
1838.
Jan. Jan. Jan. Jan. Jan. Feb. Total
7-11 12-16 17-21 22-26 27-31 1-5
7 4 15 20 7 2 55
Twenty-seven were males and twenty-eight females. The ages were as follow:
under 1-5 5-10 10-20 20-40 40-60 60-80 80-90 Total
one
1 6 4 4 3 8 20 9 55
--_Second Report of the Registrar-General_, p. 98.
[1547] Stark, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ LXXI. (1849), p. 388; W.
Robertson, _Month. Journ. Med. Sc._ IX. (1849). The other outbreaks
reported in that part of Scotland (_ibid._) were slight--at Dalkeith,
Haddington, Borrowstowness.
[1548] Easton, _Glas. Med. Journ._ V. 444.
[1549] Sutherland, _Report of the Board of Health_.
[1550] Sutherland, _Report_, u. s.; Grieve, _Month. J. Med. Sc._ IX. 777.
Barker, _ibid._ 940 (gives good account of the stormy weather).
[1551] _Month. Journ. Med. Sc._ IX. 783, 857, 1011, X. 403.
[1552] _Ibid._ IX. 1009.
[1553] Sutherland, _Report_, u. s. The year 1847, in which there was no
cholera, had been much more fatal in the chief towns of Scotland, than
either 1848 or 1849, owing to the great prevalence of typhus (Stark):
_Deaths from all causes._
1846 1847 1848 1849
Edinburgh 4594 6706 5475 4807
Glasgow 10854 18071 12475 12231
Dundee 1531 2520 2146 2312
Paisley 1429 2068 1552 1712
Leith 801 955 1212 1066
Greenock 1087 2214 1289 2344
Aberdeen 1315 1466 2366
[1554] H. MacCormac to Graves, _Dub. Journ. Med. Sc._ N. S. VII. 245.
[1555] Most of the information on the cholera of 1849 in England comes
from two sources: (1) the _Report of the General Board of Health on the
Epidemic Cholera of 1848 and 1849_ (Parl. papers, 1850), containing the
detailed reports of Mr R. D. Grainger for London, and of Dr John
Sutherland for various other towns; and (2) the _Quarterly Reports of the
Registrar-General for the year 1849_. See also note 3, p. 846.
[1556] Sutherland, _Report_, u. s. p. 121. At Sheffield (_ibid._ p. 108) a
sudden outbreak of diarrhoea occurred on 26 August over the whole town;
5319 cases of it were known, with only 76 cases of cholera and 46 deaths.
[1557] Henry Cooper, “On the Cholera Mortality in Hull during the epidemic
of 1849,” _Journ. Statist. Soc._ XVI. 347. The total is higher than that
in the Table.
[1558] Sutherland, _Report_, u. s., with map.
[1559] For Bristol, Sutherland (p. 126) cites Goldney: “In a certain
lodging-house there were 35 attacks and 33 deaths during the epidemic of
1832.... Out of the same house in 1849, 64 people were turned, of whom 49
were sent to the House of Refuge.” Not one case of cholera occurred among
these, but many attacks of diarrhoea, which was general all through the
epidemic, especially along the Frome.
[1560] The epidemic in the small Devonshire fishing village of Noss Mayo
near Plympton St Mary, was very fully investigated by A. C. Maclaren,
_Journ. Statist. Soc._ XIII. (1850), p. 103. The Oxford epidemic (75
deaths) was described by Greenhill and Allen in the _Ashmolean Society
Reports_. For Tynemouth, see Greenhow, _Trans. Epid. Soc._ The volume by
Baly and Gull, _Reports on Epidemic Cholera drawn up at the desire of the
Cholera Committee Roy. Col. Phys._ London, 1854, is in great part a review
of the epidemic of 1849, in the form of a general discussion of the whole
problem of Asiatic cholera. A subcommittee of the College also published a
_Report on the nature of the microscopic bodies found in the intestinal
discharges of Cholera_, London, 1849.
[1561] Farr, “Influence of elevation on the mortality of Cholera.” _Journ.
Statist. Soc._ XV. (1852), p. 155, and in the Reports of the
Registrar-General.
[1562] C. Barham, M.B., “Tavistock Parish Register,” _Journ. Statist.
Soc._ IV. 37.
[1563] Middleton, “Sanitary Statistics of Salisbury,” _ibid._ XXVII.
(1864), p. 541.
[1564] _Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the late
outbreak of Cholera in Newcastle, Gateshead and Tynemouth._ Parl. papers,
1854, pp. xl and 580.
[1565] The most elaborate and minute account of an epidemic on this
occasion was that for Oxford, _Memoir on the Cholera at Oxford in the year
1854_. By H. W. Acland, M.D., in which all the points in the problem of
cholera are illustrated from the easily surveyed local circumstances.
[1566] The registration district of Bideford had 46 deaths in 1854, the
only large total in the West country. Kingsley’s graphic picture of the
cholera of 1854 in _Two Years Ago_ may have corresponded to these naked
figures in the registration tables; but no place in Cornwall, in which
county the scene appears to be laid, could have furnished so considerable
an epidemic as the novelist describes, a few places in it having had each
some half-dozen deaths.
[1567] More than half in the end of 1853.
[1568] Nearly all in the end of 1853.
[1569] It was reported on by three commissioners, Dr Donald Fraser and
Messrs Thomas Hughes and J. M. Ludlow, in the _Report of the Committee for
Scientific Inquiries, Cholera Epidemic of 1854_. Appendix.
[1570] John Snow, M.D., _On the mode of communication of Cholera_. London,
1849, 2nd ed. 1855.
[1571] _General Board of Health, Report on Scientific Inquiries_, 1854, p.
52.
[1572] J. W. Begbie, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ April, 1855, p. 250.
[1573] _Glas. Med. Journ._ N. S. II. 127; III. 116, 500; John Crawford,
M.D., “Report of Cases in the Cholera Hosp.” _ibid._ III. 48.
[1574] W. Alexander, M.D., _Edin. Med. Journ._ II. 86. The _Edin. Med.
Journ._ I. July, 1855, p. 81, contains a few lines of abstract of a paper
by W. T. Gairdner on the diffusion of cholera in the remote districts of
Scotland. Information on the subject is invited, but it does not appear
that any full account of the cholera of 1854 in Scotland was published. It
is known to have been in Aberdeen.
[1575] _Census of Ireland 1861_, Part III. vol. 2, p. 23.
[1576] Compiled from Grainger’s report for 1849, the Registrar-General’s
Reports for 1854 and 1866, a table in _Lancet_, I. 1867, p. 125, and, for
1866, a table by Radcliffe, in _Rep. Med. Off. Priv. Council for 1866_, p.
339.
[1577] Radcliffe, _Rep. Med. Off. Privy Council for 1866_, p. 294.
[1578] Scoutetten, _Histoire médicale et topographique du Cholera Morbus_,
Metz, 1831; and _Histoire chronologique du Cholera_, Paris, 1870. David
Craigie, M.D., “Remarks on the History and Etiology of Cholera,” _Edin.
Med. and Surg. Journ._ XXXIX. (1833), 332. John Macpherson, M.D., _Annals
of Cholera_, London, 1872 and 1884. N. C. Macnamara, _A History of Asiatic
Cholera_, London, 1876.
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Transcriber's note:
Footnote 427 appears on page 233 of the text, but there is no
corresponding marker on the page.
Footnote marker 562 appears on page 312 of the text, but there is no
corresponding footnote on the page.