Let us look at another disease by the light of recent knowledge, viz.,
the epidemic influenza, concerning which I remember hearing much talk, as
a child, in 1847-48. There has been no epidemic of this disease in the
British Isles since 1847, but we may judge of its serious nature from the
computation of Peacock that in London alone 250,000 persons were stricken
down with it in the space of a few days. It is characteristic of this
disease that it invades a whole city, or even a whole country, at "one
fell swoop," resembling in its sudden onset and its extent the potato
disease which we have been considering.
The mode of its spreading forbids us to attribute it, at least in any
material degree, although it may be partially so, to contagion in the
ordinary sense, i.e., contagion passing from person to person along the
lines of human intercourse. It forbids us also to look at community of
water supply or food, or the peculiarities of soil, for the source of the
disease virus. We look, naturally, to some atmospheric condition for the
explanation. That the atmosphere is the source of the virus is made more
likely from the fact that the disease has broken out on board ship in a
remarkable way. In 1782, there was an epidemic, and on May 2 in that
year, says Sir Thomas Watson--
"Admiral Kempenfelt sailed from Spithead with a squadron, of which the
Goliah was one. The crew of that vessel were attacked with influenza on
May 29, and the rest were at different times affected; and so many of the
men were rendered incapable of duty by this prevailing sickness, that the
whole squadron was obliged to return into port about the second week in
June, not having had communication with any port, but having cruised
solely between Brest and the Lizard. In the beginning of the same month
another large squadron sailed, all in perfect health, under Lord Howe's
command, for the Dutch coast. Toward the end of the month, just at the
time, therefore, when the Goliah became full of the disease, it appeared
in the Rippon, the Princess Amelia, and other ships of the last mentioned
fleet, although there had been no intercourse with the land."
Similar events were noticed during the epidemic of 1833:
"On April 3, 1833, the very day on which I saw the first two cases that I
did see of influenza--all London being smitten with it on that and the
following day--the Stag was coming up the Channel, and arrived at two
o'clock off Berry Head on the coast of Devonshire, all on board being at
that time well. In half an hour afterward, the breeze being easterly and
blowing off the land, 40 men were down with the influenza, by six o'clock
the number was increased to 60, and by two o'clock the next day to 160.
On the self-same evening a regiment on duty at Portsmouth was in a
perfectly healthy state, but by the next morning so many of the soldiers
of the regiment were affected by the influenza that the garrison duty
could not be performed by it."
After reviewing the various hypotheses which had been put forward to
account for the disease, sudden thaws, fogs, particular winds, swarms of
insects, electrical conditions, ozone, Sir Thomas Watson goes on to say:
"Another hypothesis, more fanciful perhaps at first sight than these, yet
quite as easily accommodated to the known facts of the distemper,
attributes it to the presence of innumerable minute substances, endowed
with vegetable or with animal life, and developed in unusual abundance
under specific states of the atmosphere in which they float, and by which
they are carried hither and thither."
This hypothesis has certainly more facts in support of it now than it had
when Sir Thomas Watson gave utterance to it in 1837. And when another
epidemic of influenza occurs, we may look with some confidence to having
the hypothesis either refuted or confirmed by those engaged in the
systematic study of atmospheric bacteria. Among curious facts in
connection with influenza, quoted by Watson, is the following: "During
the raging of one epidemic, 300 women engaged in coal dredging at
Newcastle, and wading all day in the sea, escaped the complaint." Reading
this, the mind naturally turns to Dr. Blackley's glass slide exposed on
the shore at Filey, and upon which no pollen was deposited, while eighty
pollen grains were deposited on a glass at a higher elevation.