A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume II (of 2) From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time

2)***

E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

(http://www.pgdp.net)

from page images generously made available by

Internet Archive

(http://archive.org)

A HISTORY

OF

EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN.

London: C. J. CLAY and SONS,

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,

AND

H. K. LEWIS,

136, GOWER STREET, W.C.

Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.

New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.

A HISTORY

OF

EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN

BY

CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D.,

FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

VOLUME II.

From the Extinction of Plague to the present time.

CAMBRIDGE:

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

1894

[All rights reserved.]

Cambridge:

PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

PREFACE.

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

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

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

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

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

September, 1894.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

TYPHUS AND OTHER CONTINUED FEVERS.

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

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

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

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

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

The epidemic fever of 1661, according to Willis.

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

Its approach was insidious and scarce perceived, with no immoderate heat or sharp thirst, but producing at length great debility and languishing, loss of appetite and loathing. Within eight days there were brain symptoms—heavy vertigo, tingling of the ears, often great tumult and perturbation of the brain. Instead of phrensy, there might be deep stupidity or insensibility; children lay sometimes a whole month without taking any notice of the bystanders, and with an involuntary flux of their excrements; or there might be frequent delirium, and constantly absurd and incongruous chimaeras in their sleep. But in men a fury, and often-times deadly phrensy, did succeed. If, however, neither stupidity nor great distraction did fall upon them, swimmings in the head, convulsive movements, with convulsions of the members and leaping up of the tendons did grievously infest them. In almost all, there were loose and stinking motions, now yellow, now thin and serous; vomiting was unusual; the urine deep red. The sufferers in this prolonged sickness wasted to a skeleton, with no great heat or evacuations to account for the wasting. Some, at the end of the disease, had a severe catarrh. In others, with little infection of the head, soon after the beginning of the fever a cruel cough and a stinking spittle, with a consumptive disposition, grew upon them, and seemed to throw them suddenly into a phthisis, from which, however, they recovered often beyond hope. In some there were swellings of the glands near the hinder part of the neck, which ripened and broke, and gave out a thin stinking ictor for a long time. "I have also seen watery pustules excited in other parts of the body, which passed into hollow ulcers, and hardly curable. Sometimes little spots and petechiales appeared here and there." But none of the spots were broad and livid, nor were there many malignant spots.

Willis then gives several cases clinically, in his usual manner. The first is of a strong and lively young man, who was sick above two months and seemed near death, but began to mend and took six weeks to recover, sweating every night or every other night of his convalescent period. The second case, aged twelve, was restored to health in a month. Numbers three and four were children of a nobleman, who both died, the convulsive type being strongly marked; one of the two was examined after death, and found to have several sections of the small intestine telescoped, but all the abdominal viscera free from disease[8], the lungs engorged, the vessels of the brain full, much water in the sub-arachnoid space, and more than half a pint in the lateral ventricles.

In farther illustration of this type of fever, epidemic in 1661, Willis goes back to his notes of a sporadic outbreak of what he thinks was the same disease in a certain family at Oxford in the winter of 1653-4[9]: yea I remember that sometime past very many laboured with such a fever. In the family in question, five children took the fever one after another during a space of four months, two of the cases proving fatal; the domestics also took it, and some strangers who came in to help them, the evil being propagated by contagion. The cases in the children are fully recorded[10], the following being some of the symptoms:

In case 1, aged seven, the illness began at the end of December, 1653 (or 1655): there were contractions of the wrist tendons, red spots like fleabites on his neck and other parts, drowsiness, and involuntary passage of the excrements. At the end of a fortnight, a flux set in and lasted for four days; next, after that, a whitish crust or scurf, as it were chalky, began to spread over the whole cavity of his mouth and throat, which being often in a day wiped away, presently broke forth anew. He mended a little, but had paralysis of his throat and pharynx, was reduced to a living skeleton, but at length got well.

Case 2, a brother, aged nine, had frequent loose and highly putrid motions on the eleventh day; and next day, the flux having ceased, the most severe colic, so that he lay crying out day and night, his belly swollen and hard as a drum, until, on the 24th day, he died in an agony of convulsions.

Case 3, a brother, aged 11, was taken with similar symptoms on the 13th February, and died on the 13th day.

Case 4, a sister, was taken ill in March, with less marked symptoms, and recovered slowly, having had no manifest crisis.

Case 5, a boy of the same family, and the youngest, fell ill about the same time as No. 4, and after the like manner, who yet, a looseness arising naturally of itself, for many days voiding choleric and greenish stuff, was easily cured.

Then comes a general reference to the domestics and visitors, who fell sick of the same and all recovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sydenham’s epidemic Constitutions.

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

Sydenham’s Constitutions.

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

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

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

"Autumnal intermittents do not at once assume the genuine type, but in all respects so imitate continued fevers that unless you examine the two respectively with the closest scrutiny, they cannot be distinguished. But, when by degrees the impetus of the ‘constitution’ is repelled and its strength reined in, the fevers change into a regular type; and as autumn goes out, they openly confess themselves, by casting their slough (larva abjecta) to be the intermittents that they really were from the first, whether quartans or tertians. If we do not attend to this diligently etc. And again, in a paragraph which does not occur in the earlier editions, he writes as follows in the context of the Intermittent Fevers of the years 1661-1664:"

It is also to be noted that in the beginning of intermittent fevers, especially those that are epidemic in autumn, it is not altogether easy to distinguish the type correctly within the first few days of their accession, since they arise at first with continued fever superadded. Nor is it always easy, unless you are intent upon it, to detect anything else than a slight remission of the disease, which, however, declines by degrees into a perfect intermission, with its type (third-day or fourth-day) corresponding fitly to the season of the year.

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

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

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

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

Typhus fever perennial in London.

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

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

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

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

It may be observed, that though the fever in the confined habitations of the poor does not rise to the same degree of violence as in jails and hospitals, yet the destruction of the human species occasioned by it must be much greater, from its being so widely spread among a class of people whose number bears a large proportion to that of the whole inhabitants. There are but few of the sick, so far as I have been able to learn, that find their way into the great hospitals in London. I shall defer the subject of the dwellings of the working class in London until a later stage.

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

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

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

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

The epidemic Constitutions following the Great Plague.

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

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