INDEX. (continued 3)

[513] This epidemic called forth two pamphlets on the relation of famine to fever, one by Dominic Corrigan, M.D., On Famine and Fever as Cause and Effect in Ireland (“no famine, no fever”), and a reply to it by H. Kennedy, M.D., On the Connexion of Famine and Fever.

[514] Pains resembling those of rheumatism were common in the fever of 1817-18 at Limerick. Barker and Cheyne, I. 432.

[515] Lamprey, u. s.

[516] Dr Kelly of Mullingar compared the smell of relapsing fever to that of burning musty straw. Dub. Quart. Journ. Med., Aug. 1863, p. 341.

[517] Cusack and Stokes, ibid. IV. 134.

[518] Barker and Cheyne, Harty, and Rogan have been cited to this effect for earlier epidemics. Graves (Clin. Med. pp. 59-60) says: “In the epidemics of 1816, 1817, 1818 and 1819, it was found by accurate computation that the rate of mortality was much higher among the rich than among the poor. This was a startling fact, and a thousand different explanations of it were given at the time.” He cites Fletcher (Pathology, p. 27) an Edinburgh observer, as follows: “The rich are less frequently affected with epidemic fevers than the poor, but more frequently die of them. Good fare keeps off diseases, but increases their mortality when they take place.”

[519] Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc. N. S. VII. 388.

[520] Census of Ireland, 1851.

[521] The Census of Ireland of 1851. Part V. Table of Deaths. 2 vols. Dublin, 1856. Upwards of two hundred pages are occupied with a chronological “Table of Cosmical Phenomena, Epizootics, Epiphitics, Famines and Pestilences in Ireland” from the earliest times. This retrospect, which is very replete but tedious and uncritical, is followed by a summary report of twenty pages on “The Last General Potato Failure, and the Great Famine and Pestilence of 1845-50,” and by a long series of tabulated extracts from contemporary writings on all matters relating to the famine.

[522] Of this total, 18,430 deaths were from dysentery and 7,264 from diarrhoea.

[523] The increase in 1849 was doubtless owing to choleraic diarrhoea during the epidemic of Asiatic cholera, the deaths from dysentery being one-half of the total.

[524] R. Mayne, M.D., “Observations on the late Epidemic Dysentery in Dublin.” Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc. VII. 294. See also papers in Dubl. Med. Press, 1849.

[525] 17th and 26th Reports of the Regr.-Genl. Ireland.

[526] Review of Murchison in Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc., Aug. and Nov. 1863, pp. 169 and 339: “We are able, from extensive opportunities of observing the epidemic [of 1846-48] in Dublin, to verify the statement of Dr H. Kennedy as to the infrequency of enteric fever.”

[527] Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc. Nov. 1865, p. 285.

[528] See p. 273, supra.

[529] O’Connor, u. s. p. 286, “Typhoid has scarcely appeared in this locality, which cannot boast of the excellence of its sewerage.”

[530] “On Atmospheric Conditions influencing the Prevalence of Typhus Fever.” Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc., May, 1866, p. 309.

[531] H. Kennedy, M.D., “Further Observations on Typhus and Typhoid Fevers as seen in Dublin.” Ibid., Aug. 1862, p. 50.

[532] Nearly one-half of all the enteric fever deaths in Ulster and Leinster come respectively from Belfast and Dublin:

Year Belfast Dublin

1889 236 231

1890 190 168

1891 156 185

[533] Higden’s Polychronicon. Rolls Series, I. 332.

[534] Dyall of Agues. London, [1564].

[535] Essay on Epidemic Diseases. Dublin, 1734.

[536] Dissert. Epistol. § 93. Greenhill’s ed. p. 378.

[537] One regrets to find the above mistake in the learned pages of Murchison (p. 8). The following by Dr Robert Williams (Morbid Poisons, II. 423) is absolutely erroneous: “In Sydenham’s time, intermittent fever and dysentery were constantly endemic in London; and the mortality from the former cause alone averaged, in a comparatively small population, from one to two thousand persons annually.” What Sydenham says is that dysentery was endemic in Ireland (on the authority of Boate, no doubt), that it was epidemic in London in the end of 1669 and in the three years following, and that for the space of ten years it had appeared quite sparingly (quae per decennium jam parcius comparuerat). As to intermittents, he says they were absent from London for thirteen years, from 1664 to 1677, except in sporadic or imported cases. In the London bills the deaths from “agues” are sometimes distinguished from “fevers,” and are then seen to be only some dozen or twenty in two thousand.

[538] It is used in the Latin title of an Edinburgh graduation thesis, “De Catarrho epidemio, vel Influenza, prout in India occidentali sese ostendit,” by J. Huggar, which is assigned in Häser’s bibliography to the year 1703. Having been unable to find the thesis, I have not verified the date.

[539] Annales Monastici (St Albans), Rolls Series, No. 191, under the year 1427; Hist. MSS. Commiss. IX. pt. 1, p. 127, records of Canterbury Abbey.—An epidemic in Ireland a century before, in 1328, has been given by Sir W. R. Wilde, and by Dr Grimshaw following him, under the name of “murre,” as if that had been its name at the time. The explanation seems to be that the contemporary Irish name slaedan was rendered by Macgeoghegan, in his translation of the Annals of Clonmacnoise, by the 15th century English term “murre.” The “mure” of 1427 was a universal influenza; but the word was afterwards used for a common cold, along with poss, as in Gardiner’s Triall of Tabacco, 1610, fol. 12 and 15: “stuffings in the head, murres and pose, coughs”; and “the poze, murre, horsenesse, cough” etc.

[540] Cal. Cecil. MSS. I. under the dates.

[541] Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, I. 32.

[542] Cited in Southey’s Commonplace Book, from Fuller’s Pisgah Sight, p. 54.

[543] Southey, Commonplace Book, from Strype’s Memorials of Cranmer, p. 284.

[544] Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, ed. Whitaker, App. p. 152.

[545] Baines, Lancashire, II. 679: 39 deaths from 17 to 24 August, 1551, set down to “plague,” i.e. sweat.

[546] Lest it may be supposed that there has been adequate discussion of the differences between epidemic agues and influenzas, I quote from Hirsch’s Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie the passage in which these epidemics or pandemics of “malarial fever” are referred to: “These epidemics of malaria, which extend not unfrequently over large tracts of country, and sometimes even over whole divisions of the globe, forming true pandemics, correspond always in time with a considerable increase in the amount of sickness at the endemic malarious foci, whether near or distant; they either die out after lasting a few months, or they continue—and this applies particularly to the great pandemic outbreaks—for several years, with regular fluctuations depending on seasonal influences. On the very verge of the period to which the history of malarial epidemics can be traced back, we meet with a pandemic of that sort, in the years 1557 and 1558, which is said to have overrun all Europe (Palmarius, De morbis contagiosis. Paris, 1578, p. 322).... It is not until the years 1678-82 that we again meet with definite facts relating to an epidemic extending over a great part of Europe....” (Eng. Transl. I. 229.)

[547] Queen Elizabeth and her Times. Ed. Wright, 2 vols. Lond. 1838, I. 113. Sir W. Cecil writing from Westminster to Sir T. Smith on 29th December [1563] says: “The cold here hath so assayled us that the Queen’s majestie hath been much troubled, and is yet not free from the same that I had in November, which they call a pooss, and now this Christmas, to keep her Majestie company, I have been newly so possessed with it as I could not see, but with somewhat ado I wryte this. We have had perpetuall frosts here sence the 16th of this month. Men doo now ordinarily pass over the Thamiss, which I thynk they did not since the 8th yere of the reign of King Henry the VIII.” Ibid. I. 157. For “poss,” see note p. 305.

[548] Ephemer. Meteorol. anni 1561 [for the latitude of Brabant]. Antwerp, 1561: “Tusses numero infinitae atque tanta contagionis vi praestabunt ut pauci immunes reliquant, praecipuè circa mensis finem.” The almanacks of those times must have been constructed on the same principle as the weather forecasts of our own time—namely, that of using the experience of one year for the next, just as the weather of one day is an indication for the next. In 1575 Dr Richard Foster (who became president of the College of Physicians in 1601) issued an almanack in which he foretold “sweating fevers” for the month of July (Ephemer. meteorol. ad ann. 1575. Lond. 1575). Cogan says that Francis Keene, an astronomer, also prophesied the return of the sweating sickness in 1575, “wherein he erred not much, as there were many strange fevers and nervous sickness.”

[549] Johan Boekel, Συνοψις novi morbi quem plerique medicorum catarrhum febrilem, vel febrem catarrhosam vocant, qui non solum Germaniam, sed paene universam Europam graviss. adflixit. Helmstadtii, 1580.

[550] Hoker’s “Irish historie ... to the present year 1587,” p. 165a in Holinshed’s Chronicles.

[551] This very moderate increase of the deaths in London in 1580 may be compared with the probably fabulous figures which Webster (I. 163) gives for continental cities the same year: Rome, 4000 deaths, Lübeck, 8000 deaths, Hamburg, 3000 deaths. I have given the weekly deaths and baptisms in London for five years, 1578-82, in my former volume, p. 341.

[552] There is a curious reference to “the sweat” in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act I. scene 2, where the bawd, in an aside, says: “Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.” It is known that Shakespeare adapted and condensed his play from Whetstone’s Promus and Cassandra, printed in 1578, who took it from an Italian romance. But Whetstone’s dialogue, which is pointless and verbose beside Shakespeare’s, gives an entirely different speech to the bawd at the same place in the action, making no reference to “the sweat.” The date of Measure for Measure is not certain; but it seems to belong to the earlier period of Shakespeare’s work, when he was adapting old plays most freely. Whatever its date, the war, the sweat, the gallows and poverty are evidently topical allusions pointed enough for the audience to have taken up.

[553] The year 1610 is mentioned by Short as a season of universal catarrhal fever abroad; but that epidemic is not in the modern chronologies of influenza.

[554] Chamberlain to Carleton in Court and Times of James I. I.

[555] Same to same 4 Nov. 1612. Ibid. I. p. 201.

[556] Court and Times of James I. I. p. 206.

[557] Ibid. p. 208.

[558] Court and Times of James I. p. 197.

[559] Ibid. p. 237.

[560] Ibid. Letter of 25 Nov. 1613.

[561] Cal. Coke MSS. I. 83.

[563] Graunt, Obs. upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662.

[564] Robert Boyle did not attach much importance to the name of “new disease.” “The term new disease,” he says, “is much abused by the vulgar, who are wont to give that title to almost every fever that, in autumn especially, varies a little in its symptoms or other circumstances from the fever of the foregoing year or season.” (Boyle’s Works. 6 vols. 1772, V. 66.) But it was the name commonly given to the epidemics of catarrhal fever among others, and it does not appear, when the history is examined closely, that it was ever given except to some epidemic separated by several years from the last of the kind.

[565] Sir R. Leveson’s Letters. Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 146.

[566] Pp. 568-577.

[567] Πυρετολογια sive Gulielmi Dragei Hitchensis Ιατρου καὶ Φιλοσοφου Observationes ab Experientia de Febribus Intermittentibus. Londini, 1665.

[568] His tract is dated 1641.

[569] By Nicholas Sudell, licentiate in physick and student in chimistry. London, 1669.

[570] Πυρετολογια. A rational account of the Cause and Cure of Agues, with their signs, Diagnostick and Prognostick. Also some Specified Medicines prescribed for the Cure of all sorts of Agues, &c. Whereunto is added a short account of the Cause and Cure of Feavers and the Griping in the Guts. Authore Rto. Talbor, Pyretiatro. Londini, 1672.

[571] Sir Thomas Watson (Practice of Physic, I. 725) has a story which shows how long these fancies, encouraged by quacks, may linger: “A coachman by whose side I sat while travelling from Broadstairs to Margate was speaking of the rarity of ague in that part of the Isle of Thanet. His father, he said, once had the complaint, and a fit came on while he was on a visit to him, the coachman, at Ramsgate. The son administered to his suffering parent a glass of brandy; whereupon ‘he threw the agy off his stomach; and it looked for all the world like a lump of jelly.’”

[572] Philip Guide, M.D., A Kind Warning, &c. Lond. 1710.

[573] The best summary of the “history of the use of Peruvian bark” is by Sir George Baker, in Trans. Col. Phys. III. (1785), 173.

[574] Cited by Baker, l. c. p. 190.

[575] Lives of the Norths. New ed. by Jessopp. Lond. 1890, III. 188.

[576] He fell into a kind of decline and died at his country house on 5 September, Dr Radcliffe having been summoned from London without avail.

[577] Baker, l. c., “Had not physicians been taught by a man whom they, both abroad and at home, vilified as an ignorant empiric, we might at this day have had a powerful instrument in our hands without knowing how to use it in the most effectual manner.” This was written at a time when physicians spoke of “throwing in the bark”—throwing it in “with a shovel,” as an Edinburgh professor used to say.

[578] John Barker, M.D., of Sarum, and afterwards physician to the forces, says in 1742 (in his essay on the epidemic fever of 1741, u. s. p. 112) that he had Sydenham’s letter in manuscript before him, and that it was written in October, 1677.

[579] Cited by Baker, Trans. Col. Phys. III. 208.

[580] Beaufort MSS. Histor. MSS. Com. XII. App. 9, p. 85.

[581] Evelyn’s Diary, under the date of 29 Nov. 1694.

[582] Evelyn; Luttrell, I. 327.

[583] Hist. MSS. Com. V. 186. Sutherland correspondence.

[584] The Diary of John Evelyn, under the date 4 Feb. 1685.

[585] The popular imagination at the time appears to have been most impressed by Dr King’s promptitude in whipping out his lancet. Roger North must have had it incorrectly in his mind when he wrote: “About the time of the death of Charles II., it grew a fashion to let blood frequently, out of an opinion that it would have saved his life if done in time.”

[586] Obs. Med. 3rd ed. 1675, V. 5.

[587] Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, ed. Whitaker, App. p. 151. Brand, Hist. of Newcastle, under the year 1675, says that “the jolly rant” caused 724 deaths in that town, the authority given being Jabez Cay, M.D., who left his papers to Thoresby. The number given is probably the mortality from all causes.

[588] Patrick Walker’s Life of Cargill, pp. 29, 30.

[589] Synopsis Nosologiae. 3rd ed. Edin. 1780, II. 173.

[590] Epist. respons. ad R. Brady, § 42.

[591] Luttrell (Diary, I. 23) enters under Oct. 1629: “About the middle of this month vast great rains fell which have been very prejudiciall to many persons.”

[592] Christopher Love Morley, M.D., De Morbo Epidemico tam hujus quam superioris Anni, id est 1678 et 1679 Narratio. Preface dated London, 31 Dec. 1679.

[593] Lady Chaworth to Lord Roos, Calendar of the Belvoir MSS. II. 47.

[594] Lives of the Norths. Ed. cit. III. 143.

[595] Luttrell’s Historical Relation. Oxford, 1857, I. 19.

[596] Luttrell, loc. cit. I. 20, 21, 44.

[597] On 16 March, the illness of “little Frank ... hath made me suspect some kind of aguish distemper; but, if it be, it is so little that we neither perceive coming nor going.” On 7 July, another child is recovered of her feverish distemper. On 5 October, “all my little ones are very well, but some of my servants have quartan agues.” Lives of the Norths, Letters of Anne, Lady North.

[598] An authentic case of these lingering epidemic agues was that of John Evelyn in the beginning of 1683. On 7th February, 1687, he writes: “Having had several violent fits of an ague, recourse was had to bathing my legs in milk up to the knees, made as hot as I could endure it; and sitting so in a deep churn or vessel, covered with blankets, and drinking carduus posset, then going to bed and sweating. I not only missed that expected fit, but had no more, only continued weak that I could not go to church till Ash Wednesday, which I had not missed, I think, so long in twenty years”—in fact, since his “double tertian” in 1660, which kept him in bed from 17th February to 5th April.

[599] Ralph Thoresby caught it at Rotterdam, suffered from it, in the tertian form, for several weeks of October and November, 1678, and brought it home with him to Leeds. He gives a good account of the illness in his Diary (2 vols. Lond. 1830).

[600] The History of this present Fever, with its two products, the Morbus Cholera and the Gripes. By W. Simpson, Doctor in Physick. London, 1678.

[601] Cal. Belvoir MSS. II. 120. June, 1688. Bridget Noel to the Countess of Rutland.

[602] Walter Harris, M.D., De morbis acutis infantum. Lond. 1689. English transl. by Cockburn, 1693, p. 88.

[603] “Historical Account of the late General Coughs and Colds, with some Observations on other Epidemical Distempers.” Phil. Trans. XVIII. (1694), p. 109.

[604] “’Twas very remarkable that in England as well as this kingdom a short time before the general fever, a slight disease, but very universal, seized the horses too: in them it showed itself by a great defluxion of rheum from their noses; and I was assured by a judicious man, an officer in the army of Ireland, which was then drawn out and encamped on the Curragh of Kildare, there were not ten horses in a regiment that had not this disease.” Molyneux, u. s.

[605] Evelyn says nothing of a great epidemic cold in this season, but makes the following remarks on the weather: “Oct. 31. A very wet and uncomfortable season. Nov. 12. The season continued very wet, as it had nearly all the summer, if one might call it summer, in which there was no fruit, but corn was very plentiful.”

[606] Molyneux, Phil. Trans. XVIII. (1694), p. 105.

[607] “An universal cold that appeared in 1708, and was immediately preceded by a very sudden transition from heat to cold in Dublin and its vicinity.” Molyneux’s Memoirs.

[608] La Grippe may, of course, be taken literally to mean seizure; but the common use of the word seems to have been figurative for some fancy that seized many at once and became the fashion.

[609] Joannes Turner, M.D., De Febre Britannica Anni 1712. Lond. 1713, pp. 3, 4.

[610] Mead, Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion. Lond. 1720, p. 8. But Short, who wrote in 1749, places the “Dunkirk rant” under the year 1710: (Air, Weather, &c. I. 455).—“March 1, began and reigned two months an epidemic which missed few, and raged fatally like a plague in France and the Low Countries, and was brought by disbanded soldiers into England, namely a catarrhous fever called the Dunkirk rant or Dunkirk ague.... It lasted eight, ten, or twelve days. Its symptoms were a severe, short, dry cough, quick pulse, great pain of the head and over the whole body, moderate thirst, and sweating. Diuretics were the cure.”

[611] “The effects and evidences of God’s displeasure appearing more and more against us since the incorporating union [1707], mingling ourselves with the people of these abominations, making ourselves liable to their judgments, of which we are deeply sharing; particularly in that sad stroke and great distress upon many families and persons, of the burning agues, fevers never heard of before in Scotland to be universal and mortal.” Life and Death of Alexander Peden. 3rd ed. 1728. Biog. Presb. I. 140.

[612] Boyle’s Works. Ed. 1772, V. 725.

[613] Ibid. V. 49.

[614] Scotia Illustrata. Edin. 1684. Lib. II. “De Morbis,” p. 52.

[615] Commentar. Nosolog. Lond. 1727.

[616] The Method and Manner of curing the late raging Fevers, and of the danger, uncertainly and unwholesomeness of the Jesuit’s bark. Dated 6 Dec. 1728: “You see that intermitting fevers, when they come to be chronical (and you may see it almost everywhere) make room for a great many distempers, and those very difficult to cure.” p. 49.

[617] An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present Epidemical Diseases, viz. Fevers, Coughs, Asthmas, Rheumatisms, Defluxions, &c. By the author of “The Family Companion for Health.” London, 1729, pp. 6, 7.

[618] “Variations of the weather and Epid. Diseases, 1726-34 at Ripon.” Appendix to Essay on the Smallpox. Lond. 1740, p. 35.

[619] Comment. Nosol. p. 142.

[620] This epidemic appears to have made a much greater impression in Italy. The Political State of Great Britain for 1730, p. 172, under the date of 12th January, N. S. speaks of “the influenza, a strange and universal sickness and lingering distemper,” as causing thirty deaths a day in the public hospital of Milan, as well as fatalities at Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and Leghorn, including the deaths of two cardinals.

[621] Chronological History, p. 10.

[622] Edinburgh Medical Essays and Observations, II. p. 22, Art. 2. “An Account of the Diseases that were most frequent last year in Edinburgh” (June, 1832 to May, 1833): There had been tertian agues throughout the month of June, 1732, and from August to October an epidemic in the suburbs and villages near Edinburgh, of a slow fever, having symptoms like the “comatose” fever of Sydenham, or the remittent of children.

[623] Op. cit. p. 47.

[624] John Arbuthnot, M.D., Essay concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies. London, 1733, p. 193. His remarks upon the “hysteric” maladies that were common after the wave of influenza in Jan.-Feb. 1733, are referred to in the chapter on Continued Fevers, along with the corresponding information from Hillary, of Ripon.

[625] Gent. Magaz. 1733, Jan. p. 43.

[626] Huxham, Obs. de aere et morbis epidemicis, 1728-52, Plymuthi factae.

[627] De Aere, &c. pp. 3, 136-8.

[628] Rutty, Chronol. Hist. of Diseases in Dublin. Lond. 1770.

[629] Pringle, Diseases of the Army, p. 16.

[630] Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Cunningham, I. 235.

[631] Gent. Magaz. XIII. May 1743, p. 272.

[632] R. Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland, III. 610.

[633] Rutty, u. s. under the year 1743. In an earlier passage, he says that the influenza of 1743 raised the Dublin weekly bills to a highest point of 67, so that it must have been very slight in that city.

[634] Huxham, Obs. de aere etc., 2nd ed. 3 vols. Lond. 1752-70, II. 99.

[635] W. Watson, Phil. Trans. LII. 646.

[636] Cleghorn, Observations on the Epidemical Diseases in Minorca, 1744-49, p. 132.

[637] This influenza was observed in the North American Colonies. It is noteworthy that Huxham, of Plymouth, records under October, 1752, that hundreds of people at once had cough, sore throat, defluxions from the nose, eyes and mouth, attended with a slight fever, and more or less of a rash, several having a great flux of the belly.—On Ulcerous Sore Throat, 1757, p. 13.

[638] W. Hillary, M.D., Obs. on ... Epid. Diseases in Barbadoes. Lond. 1760.

[639] It is not described for England, unless a reference by Bisset for Cleveland, Yorkshire, should apply to it. Short says, under the year 1758 (Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England, &c. 1767): A healthy year in general, “only in the harvest was a very sickly mortal time among the poor, of a putrid slow fever, which carried off many. An epidemic catarrh broke out in November, and made a sudden sweep over the whole kingdom.” Barker, of Coleshill, says, in his Putrid Constitution of 1777 (Birmingham, 1779, p. 49): “In the remarkable intermittents of 1758 or 9 ... the early and consequently injudicious use of the bark was attended with such fatal effects that a few doses only sometimes totally oppressed the head, brought on a most rapid delirium, and cut off persons in half-an-hour.”

[640] Robert Whytt, M.D., “On the Epidemic Disorder of 1758 in Edinburgh and other parts of the South of Scotland.” Med. Obs. and Inq. by a Society of Physicians, 6 vols. Lond. II. (1762), p. 187. With notices by Millar, of Kelso, and Alves, of Inverness.

[641] Archibald Smith, M.D., “Notices of the Epidemics of 1719-20 and 1759 in Peru,” &c. from the Medical Gazette of Lima, on the authority of Don Antonio de Ulloa. Trans. Epid. Soc. II. pt. 1, p. 134.

[642] Horace Walpole’s Letters, ed. Cunningham, III. 281.

[643] C. Bisset, Essay on the Medical Constitution of Great Britain, 1 Jan. 1758, to Midsummer 1760. Lond. 1762, p. 279.

[644] Extract from the parish register printed by Dr G. B. Longstaff in an appendix to his Studies in Statistics. Lond. 1891, p. 443.

[645] Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England &c. London, 1767.

[646] Rutty, op. cit. p. 275. Compare Watson, supra, p. 351.

[647] G. Baker, De Catarrho et de Dysenteria Londinensi epidemicis, 1762, Lond. 1764; W. Watson, “Some remarks upon the Catarrhal Disorder which was very frequent in London in May 1762, and upon the Dysentery which prevailed in the following autumn.” Phil. Trans. LII. (1762), p. 646.

[648] Professor Alexander Monro, primus, of Edinburgh, describes his own attack in a letter to his son, Dr Donald Monro, 11 June, 1766 (Works of Alex. Monro, M.D. with Life, Edin. 1781, p. 306): “My case is this: in May, 1762, I had the epidemic influenza, which affected principally the parts in the pelvis; for I had a difficulty and sharp pain in making water and going to stool. My belly has never since been in a regular way, passing sometimes for several days nothing but bloody mucus, and that with considerable tenesmus” &c. Dysentery was epidemic in 1762 as well as influenza.

[649] Donald Monro, M.D., Diseases of the British Military Hospitals in Germany, &c. Lond. 1764, p. 137.

[650] Med. Trans. published by the College of Physicians in London, I. 437. Heberden’s paper was read at the College, Aug. 11, 1767.

[651] The nearest approach to Heberden’s London influenza of 1767 is an epidemic that Sims observed in Tyrone in the autumn of 1767; a season remarkable for measles and acute rheumatism. At the same time that the acute rheumatism prevailed, a fever showed itself, like it; the patients for two or three days were languid, chilly, with pains in the bones, headache, stupor, dry tongue, costiveness. It was marked by remissions, was by no means mortal, and usually ended by a sweat from the 14th to the 17th day, followed by a copious deposit in the urine. James Sims, Obs. on Epidemic Disorders, Lond. 1773, p. 84.

[652] Anthony Fothergill, Mem. Med. Soc. III. 30. This paper is not included in John Fothergill’s series. There is also a separate Dublin essay, Advice to the People upon the Epidemic Catarrhal Fever of Oct. Nov. Dec. 1775. By a Physician.

[653] I have not found the weekly bills for this year in London; but the following averages, taken from the four-weekly or five-weekly totals in the Gentleman’s Magazine, will show how slight the rise was:

1775. October weekly average 323 births 345 deaths

November " " 334 " 447 "

December " " 369 " 449 "

[654] W. Grant, M.D., Observations on the late Influenza as it appeared at London in 1775 and 1782. Lond. 1782. Also, by the same, A Short Account of the Present Epidemic Cough and Fever, in a letter &c. First printed at Bath, and afterwards at London, 1776.

[655] MS. Infirmary Book.

[656] The reports collected by Dr John Fothergill (Med. Obs. and Inquir. VI. 340) were by himself, and by Pringle, Baker, Heberden and Reynolds, of London; Cuming, of Dorchester; Glass, of Exeter (long account): Ash, of Birmingham; White, of York; Haygarth, of Chester; Pulteney, of Blandford; Thomson, of Worcester; Skene, of Aberdeen; and Campbell, of Lancaster. The papers of this collective inquiry, as well as the two collections in 1782, the collection of Simmonds in 1788, that of Beddoes in 1803 (in a digest) and the Report of the Provincial Medical Association in 1837, together with some other extracts from books or papers, were brought together in a volume, without much editing, by Dr Theophilus Thompson, under the title of The Annals of Influenza in Great Britain from 1510 to 1837. London, 1852. This has been reprinted and brought down to date by Dr Symes Thompson, 1891.

[657] Mem. Med. Soc. III. 34.

[658] Life of Sir Robert Christison, 2 vols. Edin. 1885, vol. I. (Autobiography), p. 82.

[659] For the year 1730, under the date 12 January, p. 172.

[660] “An Account of the Epidemic Catarrh of the Year 1782; compiled at the request of a Society for promoting Medical Knowledge.” By Edward Gray, M.D., F.R.S., Medical Communications, I. (1784), p. 1.

[661] “An Account of the Epidemic Disease called the Influenza, of the Year 1782, collected from the observations of several physicians in London and in the Country; by a Committee of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians in London.” Medical Transactions published by the Coll. of Phys. in London, III. (1785), p. 54. Read at the College, June 25, 1783.

[662] John Clark, M.D., On the Influenza at Newcastle. Dated 26 May, 1782; Arthur Broughton, The Influenza or Epid. Catarrh in Bristol in 1782. London, 1782; W. Falconer, Account of the Influenza at Bath in May-June, 1782. Bath, 1782.

[663] Gregory, cited by Christison, Life &c. I. 84: “I have been told of the haymakers attempting to struggle with the sense of fatigue, but being obliged in a few minutes to lay down their scythes and stretch themselves on the field.”

[664] Gray, u. s. p. 107.

[665] The London Medical Journal, III. (1783), 318.

[666] College of Physicians’ Report: “A family which came in the Leeward Islands fleet in the end of September, 1782, was attacked by it in the beginning of October. This family afterwards told the physician who attended them that several of their acquaintances, who came over in the same fleet with them, had been attacked at the same time and in the same manner as themselves.”

[667] He had another experience not quite the rule: “Children and old people either escaped this influenza entirely, or were affected in a slight manner.”

[668] R. Hamilton, M.D., “Some Remarks on the Influenza in Spring, 1782,” Mem. Med. Soc. II. 422. This author had some difficulty in deciding where the influenza ended and the epidemic ague began.

[669] Trans. Col. Phys. “On the late Intermittent Fevers,” III. 141. Read at the College, 10 Jan., 1785.

[670] Ibid. p. 168.

[671] Febris Anomala, or the New Disease. Lond. 1659, p. 1.

[672] “Remarks on the Treatment of Intermittents, as they occurred at Hampstead in the Spring of 1781.” By Thomas Hayes, Surgeon. Lond. Med. Journ. II. 267.

[673] Epidemicks (1777-95), pp. 58, 72, 75, &c. Barker’s annals from 1779 to 1786 are full of references to agues, “bad burning fevers” and the like, but are on the whole too confused to be of much use for history. See the Boston bills under Smallpox.

[674] W. Moss, Familiar Medical Survey of Liverpool. Liverpool, 1784, p. 117. This writer’s object is to show that Liverpool escaped most of the epidemic diseases that troubled other places, including typhus fever. As to the influenzas he says: “The influenza of 1775, so universal and very fatal in many parts, was less fatal here; and also that much slighter complaint, distinguished by the same title, which appeared in the spring of 1783.”

[675] Gent. Magaz. LIII. pt. 2, p. 920. Letter dated from “Pontoon.”

[676] William Coley, Account of the late Epidemic Ague in the neighbourhood of Bridgenorth, Shropshire, in 1784 ... to which are added some observations on a Dysentery that prevailed at the same time. Lond. 1785.

[677] Baker, u. s.

[678] “An Account of the Effects of Arsenic in Intermittents.” By J. C. Jenner, surgeon at Painswick, Gloucestershire. Lond. Med. Journ. IX. (1788), p. 47.

[679] Ibid. VII. (1786), p. 163.

[680] Table compiled by Dr Mackenzie, and printed by Christison, Trans. Soc. Sc. Assoc. Edin. Meeting, 1863, p. 97. Christison pointed out very fairly the difficulties in the way of accepting the drainage-theory for the decline of ague (p. 98), but he had not realized the fact that the disease used to come in epidemics at long intervals.

[681] e.g. parish of Dron, Perthshire (IX. 468): “The return of spring and autumn never failed to bring along with them this fatal disease [ague], and frequently laid aside many of the labouring hands at a time when their work was of the greatest consequence and necessity.” That had now ceased, owing to drainage. See also Cramond parish, I. 224, and Arngask, Perthshire, I. 415.

[682] The following extracts are from Barker’s book, Epidemicks, Birmingham [1795]: 1782. Influenza in the latter end of spring. Nine out of ten in Lichfield and other towns had violent defluxions of the nose, throat and lungs, bringing on violent sneezings, soreness of the throat, coughs, &c. attended with a pestilential fever, of which many were relieved by perspiration.... Some had swelled faces, and violent pains in the teeth.... Some, giddiness and violent headaches, accompanied with a slow fever, and even loss of memory.... By its running through whole families it appeared also to be communicable by infection.

1783. The influenza also began to appear again; and those who had coughs last year began now to be afflicted with them again, the disorder at length frequently ending in a consumption. Also dogs in this year and the next had running at the eyes and a loss of the use of their hind legs, which in the end killed most of those that were seized with it. Horses also suffered.

1786. In the middle of this season the influenza returned, and colds and coughs were epidemical.

1788 [spring]. A species of influenza of the pestilential kind, akin to that of 1782, has almost constantly returned in spring and autumn since that time ... [summer] A species of influenza, as in the spring, and it is also at Edinburgh.

1789 [spring]. Influenza returned. Even dogs affected.

1791. Influenza very bad, especially in London.

[683] Samuel Foart Simmons, M.D., F.R.S., “Of the Epidemic Catarrh of the year 1788.” Lond. Med. Journ. IX. (1788), p. 335.

[684] Vaughan May, surgeon to H. M. Ordnance, “Observations on the Influenza as it appeared at Plymouth, in the summer and autumn of the year 1788.” Duncan’s Med. Commentaries, Decade 2, vol. iv. p. 363.

[685] Falconer, “Influenzae Descriptio, uti nuper comparebat in urbe Bathoniae, mensibus Julio, Augusto et Septembri A.D. 1788.” Mem. Med. Soc. III. 25.

[686] George Bew, M.D., physician at Manchester, “Of the Epidemic Catarrh of the year 1788.” Lond. Med. Journ. IX. (1788), p. 354. “The influenza has been very prevalent,” writes Withering, of Birmingham, to Lettsom, 19 Aug. 1788. Mem. of Lettsom, III. 133.

[687] Related to Dr Simmons (1. c. p. 346), by Mr Boys, surgeon, of Sandwich, who was told it by his son, a lieutenant on board the ‘Rose.’

[688] In a note to Simmons’ paper, u. s., p. 342.

[689] “An Account of an Epidemic Fever that prevailed in Cornwall in the year 1788.” Lond. Med. Journal, X. p. 117 (dated Truro, Jan. 26, 1789).

[690] Bew, u. s., p. 365. Carmichael Smyth has a similar remark on the influenza of 1782: “This epidemic distemper very soon declined. But it seemed to leave behind it an epidemical constitution which prevailed during the rest of the summer; and the fevers, even in the end of August and beginning of September, assumed a type resembling, in many respects, the fever accompanying the influenza.”

[691] A solitary reference occurs to an influenza in 1792, which I have not succeeded in verifying:—B. Hutchinson, “An Account of the Epidemic Disease commonly called the Influenza, which appeared in Nottinghamshire and most other parts of the kingdom in the months of November and December, 1792.” New. Lond. Med. Journ., Lond. 1793, II. 174. Cited in the Washington Medical Catalogue.

[692] Robert Willan, M.D., Reports on the Diseases in London, particularly during the years 1796, ’97, ’98, ’99 and 1800. London, 1801, pp. 76, 253.

[693] Published in the Med. and Phys. Journal from August to December, 1803.

[694] Memoirs of the Medical Society, vol. VI.

[695] R. Hooper, M.D., Obs. on the Epidemic Disease now prevalent in London. London, 1803. R. Pearson, M.D., Obs. on the Epid. Catarrhal Fever or Influenza of 1803. Lond. 1803.

[696] J. Herdman, The prevailing Epid. Disease termed Influenza. Edin. 1803.

[697] W. Falconer, M.D., The Epidemic Catarrhal Fever commonly called the Influenza, as it appeared at Bath &c. Bath, 1803.

[698] John Nott, M.D., Influenza as it prevailed in Bristol in Feb.-April, 1803. Bristol, 1803.

[699] Med. and Phys. Journ. X. 104.

[700] Dr Currie of Chester, Med. and Phys. Journ. X. 213.

[701] Ib. X. 527, quoted by Beddoes from memory, the letter from Navan having been lost.

[702] Alvey, Mem. Med. Soc. VI. 462.

[703] Dr Carrick, of Bristol, in Duncan’s Annals of Med. III. Compare the report for Fraserburgh in 1775, supra, p. 360.

[704] Frazer, Med. and Phys. Journ. X. 206, dated 12 June, 1803.

[705] Hirsch cites authorities for influenza in Edinburgh, London, Nottingham and Newcastle in the winter of 1807-8. In Roberton’s monthly reports from Edinburgh (Med. and Phys. Journ. XXI.), and Bateman’s quarterly reports from London, I find only common colds recorded. Clarke for Nottingham (Ed. Med. Surg. Journ. IV. 429) says catarrh was so general “as to have acquired the name of influenza; but there was no reason to suppose it contagious.”

[706] W. Royston, “On a Medical Topography,” Med. and Phys. J. XXI. 1809, (Dec. 1808), p. 92: “After the unusual heat of the last summer, the frequency of intermittents in the autumn was increased in the fens of Cambridgeshire to an almost unprecedented degree; and even quadrupeds were not exempt, for distinctly marked cases of tertian were observed in horses. In the year 1780 a similar prevalence of this disease occurred in the same part; and though in an interval of 28 years many and frequent sporadic cases have arisen, yet its universality during that period was suspended. We have to regret that a correct record of the constitution of the year 1780, as applying to this particular district, has not been preserved in such a manner as to admit of a direct comparison with that of 1808. If it were possible, from authentic documents to compare the history of these two seasons, much light might be thrown on the obscure cause of intermittents.” Clarke, of Nottingham, (l. c.) says there were some cases of irregular ague among a few privates of the regiment there, who had all come from a marshy quarter, some of them with the fever on them. The paroxysms came at unusually long intervals. Bark increased the fever.

[707] Lecture on Agues, in the Lond. Med. Gaz. IX. 923-4, 24 March, 1832.

[708] Lancet, s. d., p. 438.

[709] Lond. Med. Gazette, 2 July, 1831.

[710] John Burne, M.D., Ibid. VIII. (1831), p. 430.

[711] G. Bennett, Lond. Med. Gaz. 23 July, 1831.

[712] Bellamy, Ibid.

[713] “Report of Diseases among the Poor of Glasgow,” Glas. Med. Journ. IV. 444.

[714] McDerment, ibid. V. 230: “In June and July to an extent unequalled” etc.

[715] During the last general election before the passing of the Reform Bill, which was held in the month of June, 1831, a number of the Aberdeen radicals went out on a hot and dusty day to meet the candidate of their party who was posting from the south. It was remarked that all those who had been of this company “caught cold,” unaccountably but as if from some common cause. The date would correspond to the prevalence of influenza elsewhere.

[716] Mr Kingdon, reported in the Lancet, s. d.

[717] Venables, Lancet, II. May, 1833.

[718] Hingeston, Lond. Med. Gaz. XII. 199.

[719] Gent. Magaz., April, 1833, p. 362.

[720] Whitmore, Febris anomala, or the New Disease, etc., London, 1659, p. 109:—“And for a plethora or fulness of blood, if that appears (though this may seem a paradox yet ’tis certain) that it is so far in this disease from indicating bleeding that it stands absolutely as a contradiction to it and vehemently prohibits it. And whereas they think the heat, by bleeding, may be abated and so the feaver took off, they are mistook, for by that means the fermentation through the motion of the blood is highly increased, so as sad experience hath manifested in a great many: upon the bleeding they have within a day or two fallen delirious and had their tongues as black as soot, with an intolerable thirst and drought upon them.... Petrus a Castro, who rants high for letting blood, at last as if he had been humbled with the sad success, saith etc.”

[721] A System of Clinical Medicine, Dublin, 1843, pp. 500-501. Lecture delivered in the session 1834-35.

[722] Rawlins, Lond. Med. Gaz. s. d.

[723] Ed. Med. Surg. Journ. XLIII. 1835, p. 26.

[724] Parsons, “Report of Outcases, Birmingham Infirmary, 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 1833.” Trans. Provin. Med. Surg. Assoc. II. 474.

[725] In the report upon the influenza of 1837 by a Committee of the Provincial Medical Association, the preceding epidemic is uniformly referred to the year 1834. Graves, in a clinical lecture upon that of 1837, speaks two or three times of the last as that of 1834, and, in another place, he calls it the epidemic of 1833-34. But these, I think, are mere laxities of dating, of which there are many other instances where the date is recent and not yet historical.

[726] As early as 1612 a proposal had been made to James I. for “a grant of the general registrarship of all christenings, marriages and burials within this realm.” State Papers, Rolls House, Ja. I. vol. LXIX. No. 54. It was a device for raising money.

[727] The account in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February, 1837, p. 199, is almost identical with the paragraph in the number for April, 1833: “An influenza of a peculiar character has been raging throughout the country, and particularly in the Metropolis. It has been attended by inflammation of the throat and lungs, with violent spasms, sickness and headache. So general have been its effects that business in numerous instances has been entirely suspended. The greater number of clerks at the War Office, Admiralty, Navy Pay Office, Stamp Office, Treasury, Post-Office and other Government Offices have been prevented from attending to their daily avocations.... Of the police force there were upwards of 800 incapable of doing duty. On Sunday the 13th the churches which have generally a full congregation presented a mournful scene &c. ... the number of burials on the same day in the different cemeteries was nearly as numerous as during the raging of the cholera in 1832 and 1833. In the workhouses the number of poor who have died far exceed any return that has been made for the last thirty years.”

[728] Graves, u. s., p. 545.

[729] Robert Cowan, M.D., Journ. Stat. Soc. III. 257.

[730] Peyton Blakiston, A Treatise on the Influenza of 1837, containing an analysis of one hundred cases observed at Birmingham between 1 Jan. and 15 Feb. Lond. 1837.

[731] These and some former particulars are from the “Report upon the Influenza or Epidemic Catarrh of the winter of 1836-37,” compiled by Robt. J. N. Streeten, M.D. for the Committee of the Provincial Medical Association. Trans. Prov. Med. Assoc. VI. 501.

[732] Streeten’s Report, u. s., p. 505.

[733] Statist. Report on Health of Navy, 1837-43.

[734] Jackson, Dubl. Med. Press, VIII. 69; Brady, Dubl. Journ. Med. Sc. XX. (1842), 76.

[735] Laycock, Dubl. Med. Press, VII. 234. Several cases of sudden and great enlargement of the liver and of suppression of urine were judged to be part of the epidemic.

[736] Ross, Lancet, 1845, I. p. 2.

[737] Report of Holywood Dispensary for 1842, Dublin Med. Press, IX. 204.

[738] Hall, Prov. Med. Journ. 1844, p. 315.

[739] M’Coy, Med. Press, XI. 133.

[740] Fleetwood Churchill, Dubl. Quart. Journ., May, 1847, p. 373.

[741] Farr, in Rep. Reg.-Gen.

[742] Farr, in the Report of the Registrar-General for 1848. He cites (p. xxxi) Stark for Scotland, that it “suddenly attacked great masses of the population twice during November”—on the 18th, and again on the 28th.

[743] A curious trace of the temporary interest excited by influenza in 1847-8 remains in a great book of the time, Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, the third edition of which, with new letters, was then under hand. One of the new letters related to the death of Colonel Pickering from the camp-sickness among the troops of Fairfax at Ottery St Mary in December, 1645. Carlyle’s comment is: “has caught the epidemic ‘new disease’ as they call it, some ancient influenza very prevalent and fatal during those wet winter operations.” “New disease” was the name given by Greaves to the war-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1643, but neither that nor the sickness at Ottery (which is not called “new disease” in the documents) had anything of the nature of influenza.

[744] But Dr Rose Cormack, who had known relapsing fever well in Edinburgh, wrote from Putney, near London, in October, 1849: “For some months past the majority of cases of all diseases in this neighbourhood have ... presented a well-marked tendency to assume the remittent and intermittent types.” “Infantile Remittent Fever,” Lond. Journ. of Med., Oct. 1849, reprinted in his Clinical Studies, 2 vols., 1876.

[745] T. B. Peacock, M.D., On the Influenza, or Epidemic Catarrhal Fever of 1847-8. London, 1848.

[746] Haviland, Journ. Pub. Health, IV. 288, (94 cases in June-Aug. in a village).

[747] See F. Clemow, M.D., of St Petersburg, “The Recent Pandemic of Influenza: its place of origin and mode of spread.” Lancet, 20 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1894. These papers bring together and discuss the Russian opinions, official and other. The Army Medical Report favoured the view that the birthplace of this pandemic in the autumn of 1889 was an extensive region occupied by nomadic tribes in the northern part of the Kirghiz Steppe. There is evidence of its rapid progress westwards over Tobolsk to the borders of European Russia. Influenza is said to be constantly present in many parts of the Russian Empire; but the circumstances that have, on four or five occasions in the 19th century, set the infection rolling in a great wave westwards from the assumed source are wholly unknown.

[748] The collective inquiry on the epidemics was made by the medical department of the Local Government Board, the result being given in two reports: Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889-90, Parl. Papers, 1891, and Further Report and Papers on Epidemic Influenza, 1889-92, Parl. Papers, Sept. 1893. By H. Franklin Parsons, M.D. Statistical tables comparing the epidemics in London with those in some other capitals were published by F. A. Dixey, M.D., Epidemic Influenza, Oxford, 1892.

[749] The notable difference between the type of this epidemic and that of the epidemics of 1833, 1837 and 1847, from which the conventional notion of “influenza cold” was derived, is perhaps the explanation of the following apt and erudite remark by Buchanan, on “influenza proper,” in his introduction to the first departmental report, 1891: “It would be no small gain to get more authentic methods of identifying influenza proper from among the various grippes, catarrhs, colds and the like—in man, horse, and other animals—that take to themselves the same popular title” (p. xi).

[750] The volume by Julius Althaus, M.D., Influenza: its Pathology, Complications and Sequelae, 2nd ed., Lond. 1892, includes a summary and bibliography of recent observations.

[751] Noah Webster, Brief History of Epidemick Diseases, I. 288; Warren, of Boston, to Lettsom, 30 May, 1790, Lettsom’s Memoirs, III. 238: “whether this [the second] is a variety of influenza, or a new disease with us, I am at a loss to determine.”

[752] In Twysden’s Decem Scriptores, col. 579.

[753] Boyle’s Works, 6 vols., London, 1772, V. 52.

[754] Seneca, Nat. Quaest. § 27, cited by Webster. After earthquakes, “subitae continuaeque mortes, et monstrosa genera morborum ut ex novis orta causis.” The passage cited from Baglivi (p. 530) looks like a repetition of this: “imo nova et inaudita morborum genera ... post terraemotus.”

[755] Cited by Horace E. Scudder, in Noah Webster. New York and London, 1881, p. 105.

[756] Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, 2 vols., Hartford, 1799.

[757] Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, II. 15.

[758] Id. II. 34, 84. Dr Robert Williams, in his work on Morbid Poisons (II. 670) argues for Webster’s electrical theory of influenza without knowing, or at least without saying, that it was Webster’s. The much-advertised writings of Mr John Parkin on The Volcanic Theory of Epidemics (or other title) follow Webster very closely both in the main idea and in its ramifications, but without acknowledgment to the American philosophe. Milton’s rule was that one might take from an old author if one improved upon him; but neither Williams nor Parkin has improved upon Webster.

[759] Ibid. II. 30.

[760] “Catalogue of Recorded Earthquakes from 1606 B.C. to A.D. 1850.” British Assocn. Reports, 1852-54.

[761] Abraham Mason, Phil. Trans. LII. Part 2, p. 477.

[762] Webster, I. 150.

[763] Hillary, Changes of the Air, etc., p. 82.

[764] Hillary, Changes of the Air, etc., p. 80.

[765] Webster, I. 250.

[766] Hamilton, Phil. Trans. LXXIII. 176.

[767] Mallet’s Catalogue, u. s.

[768] Holm, Vom Erdbrande auf Island im Jahre 1783, Kopenhagen, 1784, says: “Since the outbreak began, the atmosphere of the whole country has been full of vapour, smoke and dust, so much so that the sun looked brownish-red, and the fishermen could not find the banks.... Old people, especially those with weak chests, suffered much from the smell of sulphur and the volcanic vapours, being afflicted with dyspnoea. Various persons in good health fell ill, and more would have suffered had not the air been cooled and refreshed from time to time by rains,” pp. 57, 60. The real sickness of Iceland in those years had been before the volcanic eruptions, in 1781 and 1782, when some parts of the island were almost depopulated by the famine and pestilential fevers that followed the unusual seasons.

[769] Phil. Trans. II. (1667), p. 499.

[770] Ibid. March-Apr. 1694, p. 81. Sloane had himself felt several shocks at Port Royal on the 20th October, 1687, between four and six o’clock in the morning, which were due to the same earthquake that destroyed Lima in Peru.

[771] Phil. Trans. XVIII. p. 83 (March-April, 1794). Series of reports from Jamaica collected by Sloane.

[772] A few cases have been exceptionally seen at Spanish Town, six miles from the head of the bay, the infection of which was supposed to have been brought from the shore by sailors, and it has also prevailed in the barracks on the high ground of Newcastle not far from the shore.

[773] Without seeking to argue for the connexion between particular earthquakes and influenzas, but merely to illustrate the possibilities, I append here an instance that ought not to be overlooked. On the 1st of November, 1835, there was a great earthquake in the Moluccas, which so completely changed the soil of the island of Amboina, that it became notably subject to deadly miasmatic or malarious fevers from that time forth. For three weeks before the earthquake the atmosphere had been full of a heavy sulphurous fog, so that miasmata were rising from the soil by some unwonted pressure before the actual cataclysm. There is no doubt at all that Amboina became “malarious” in a most marked degree from the date of the earthquake; it is a classical instance of the sudden effect of great changes in the earth’s crust upon the frequency and malignity of remittent and intermittent fevers, according to the testimony of physicians in the Dutch East Indian service. The influenza nearest to the earthquake was about a year after, at Sydney, Cape Town, and in the East Indies, during October and November, 1836. The epidemic appeared about the same time in the north-east of Europe, spread all over the continent, and reached London in January, 1837. There was again influenza in Australia and New Zealand in November, 1838, two years after the last outbreak in that region.

[774] Phil. Trans. for the year 1694, p. 5.

[775] Mallet, “First Report on the Facts of Earthquake Phenomena.” Trans. Brit. Assoc. for 1850, Lond. 1851. Cited from von Hoff.

[776] Archibald Smith, M.D., “Notices of the Epidemics of 1719-20 and 1759 in Peru,” etc. Trans. Epid. Soc. II. pt. 1, p. 134. From the Medical Gazette of Lima, 15 March, 1862.

[777] Bell’s Travels, in Pinkerton, VII. 377.

[778] See an article “Railways—their Future in China,” by W. B. Dunlop, in Blackwood’s Magazine, March, 1889, pp. 395-6. A letter in the Pall Mall Gazette, dated 23 May, 1891, and signed “Shanghai,” recalled the outbreak of Hongkong fever, “the symptoms of which bore a curious resemblance to the influenza epidemic,” at the time when much building was going on upon the slope of Victoria Peak: “It was said at the time—I do not know with what truth—that in this turning-up of the soil, several old Chinese burying-places were included.”

[779] Essay on the Most Effective Means of preserving the Health of Seamen in the Royal Navy. London, 1757, p. 83.

[780] See The Eruption of Krakatoa and subsequent phenomena. Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society.... Edited by G. J. Symons, London, 1888.

[781] Edin. Med. Essays and Obs. II. 32.

[782] Trans. Col. Phys. III. 62.

[783] Gent. Magaz. 1782, p. 306.

[784] R. Robertson, M.D., Observations on Jail, Hospital or Ship Fever from the 4th April, 1776, to the 30th April, 1789. Lond. 1789, New ed., p. 411.

[785] Trotter, Medicina Nautica, I. 1797, p. 367.

[786] Notes of a lecture on Influenza, by Gregory, taken by Christison about the year 1817, in the Life of Sir Robert Christison, I. 82.

[787] College of Physicians’ Report, Trans. Col. Phys. III. 63.

[788] This is inferred from the varying number of ships in the two fleets in the several notices of their movements in the Gentleman’s Magazine, for May and June, 1782.

[789] Brian Tuke to Peter Vannes, 14 July, 1528: “For when a whole man comes from London and talks of the sweat, the same night all the town is full of it, and thus it spreads as the fame runs.” Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. IV. 1971.

[790] Webster, II. 63.

[791] College of Physicians’ Report. Trans. Col. Phys. III. (1785), p. 60-61. “Information has been received” of the incident.

[792] Statist. Report of Health of Navy, 1837-43. Parl. papers, 1 June, 1853, p. 8.

[793] Ibid. p. 14.

[794] Ibid. s. d.

[795] Report on Health of Navy, 1857, p. 69.

[796] Ibid. p. 41.

[797] Ibid. p. 131.

[798] Ibid. p. 112.

[799] Report for 1856, p. 100.

[800] Chaumezière, Fievre catarrhals épidemique, observée à bord du vaisseau ‘Le Duguay-Trouin’ aux mois de Fevr. et Mars, 1863. Paris, 1865. Cited by Hirsch.

[801] Dr Guthrie, of Lyttelton.

[802] Macdonald, Brit. Med. Journ., 14 July, 1886.

[803] Cruise of H.M.S. ‘Galatea’ in 1867-8.

[804] R. A. Chudleigh, in Brit. Med. Journal, 4 Sept. 1886. The experiences are not altogether recent, for they were noted for “the Chatham Islands and parts of New Zealand” by Dieffenbach, in his German translation of Darwin’s Naturalist’s Voyage round the World. See English ed. 1876, p. 435 note.

[805] Pall Mall Gazette, 11 Dec. 1889.

[806] Hirsch, Geograph. and Histor. Pathol. I. 29. Engl. Transl.

[807] See the chapter on Sweating Sickness in the first volume of this History, p. 269, and the author’s other writings there cited.

[808] See the first volume, pp. 456-461. I shall add here a reference to smallpox among young people in Henry VIII.’s palace at Greenwich in 1528. Fox, newly arrived from a mission to France, writes to Gardiner, 11 May, 1528 (Harl. MS. 419, fol. 103): The king “commanded me to goe unto Maystress Annes chamber, who at that tyme, for that my Lady prynces and dyvers other the quenes maydenes were sicke of the small pocks, lay in the gallerey in the tilt yarde.”

[809] Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery and Synod of Aberdeen. Edited by John Stuart, for the Spalding Club, Aberd. 1846, I. 427.

[810] Mead to Stutteville, in Court and Times of Charles I., I. 359. Joan, Lady Coke to Sir J. Coke, 26 June, 1628. Cal. Coke MSS.

[811] Lord Dorchester to the Earl of Carlisle, 30 Aug. 1628, in C. and T. Charles I.: “Your dear lady hath suffered by the popular disease, but without danger, as I understand from her doctor, either of death or deformity.”

[812] Gilbert Thacker to Sir J. Coke at Portsmouth, 9 June, 1628; Thomas Alured to the same, 21 June; Richard Poole to the same, 23 June. Cal. Coke MSS., I. Thomas Alured’s house “hath been visited in the same kind, once with the measles and twice with the smallpox, though I thank God we are now free; and I know not how many households have run the same hazard.”

[813] Harl. MS., No. 2177.

[814] The original heading in the Bills of Mortality was “flox and smallpox.” “Flox” meant flux, or confluent smallpox, which was so distinguished, as if in kind, from the ordinary discrete form, seldom fatal. Huxham, in 1725, Phil. Trans. XXXIII. 379, still used these terms: “When the pustules broke out in less than twenty-four hours from the seizure, they were always of the flux kind, as is commonly observed.... Pocks which at first were distinct would flux together during suppuration.” Dover, Physician’s Legacy, 1732, p. 101, has “the flux smallpox, or variolae confluentes,” as one of the varieties: and again, pustules “fluxing in some parts, in others distinct.”

[815] Having been omitted by Graunt in his table. Op. cit. 1662.

[816] Cal. State Papers, under the dates. The epidemic seems to have revived in 1642. An affidavit among the papers of the House of Lords, excusing the attendance of a witness, states that Thomas Tallcott has recently lost his wife and one child by smallpox, and that he himself, six of his children and three of his servants are now visited with the same disease. 13 July, 1642, Hist. MSS. Com. V. 38. The Mercurius Rusticus, 1643, says that Bath was much infected both with the plague and the smallpox. Cited in Hutchins, Dorsetshire, III. 10.

[817] Remaining Works. Transl. by Pordage. Lond. 1681. “Of Feavers,” p. 142. In one of his cases Willis was at first uncertain as to the diagnosis, because “the smallpox had never been in that place.”

[818] Histor. MSS. Commis. V. 156-154. Sutherland Letters.

[819] Sutherland Letters, u. s. Andrew Newport to Sir R. Leveson at Trentham.

[820] Mary Barker to Abel Barker, 26 May and 2 June, 1661. Hist. MSS. Com. V. 398: “There is many dy out in this town, and many abroad that we heare of”; the squire’s mother is living “within a yard of the smallpox, which is also in the house of my nearest neighbour”; her own children had whooping cough, but do not appear to have taken smallpox.

[821] Hactenus Inaudita, or Animadversions upon the new found way of curing the Smallpox. London, 1663. Dated 10 July, 1662. The burden of his own complaint is of a prominent personage in the smallpox who was killed, as he maintains, by enormous doses of diacodium, an opiate with oil of vitriol, much in request among the partisans of the cooling regimen.

[822] His first book was Περὶ ὑδροποσίας, or A Discourse of Waters, their Qualities and Effects, Diaeteticall, Pathologicall and Pharmacuiticall. By Tobias Whitaker, Doctor in Physicke of Norwich. Lond. 1834. In 1638, being then Doctor in Physick of London, he published The Tree of Humane Life, or the Bloud of the Grape. Proving the Possibilitie of maintaining humane life from infancy to extreame old age without any sicknesse by the use of wine. An enlarged edition in Latin was published at Frankfurt in 1655, and reprinted at the Hague in 1660, and again in 1663. The passages cited in the text occur in his Opinions on the Smallpox. London, 1661.

[823] His only reference to the deaths in the royal family, which were currently set down to professional mismanagement, comes in where he opposes the prescription of Riverius to bathe the hands and feet in cold water: “this hath proved fatall,” he says, “in such as have rare and tender skins, as is proved by the bathing of the illustrious Princess Royal. Therefore I shall rather ordain aperient fomentations in their bed, to assist their eruption and move sweat.”

[824] Pyretologia, II. 94, 112.

[825] Walter Harris, M.D., De morbis acutis infantum, 1689. There were several editions, some in English.

[826] Jurin, Letter to Cotesworth. Lond. 1723, p. 11.

[827] Speaking of malignant sore-throat, he says: “The younger the patients are, the greater is their danger, which is contrary to what happens in the measles and smallpox.” Commentaries on Diseases, p. 25.

[828] Andrew’s Practice of Inoculation impartially considered. Exeter, 1765, p. 60.

[829] Duvillard (Analyse et Tableaux de l’Influence de la Petite Vérole sur la Mortalité à chaque Age. Paris, 1806) gives the ages at which 6792 persons died of smallpox at Geneva from 1580 to 1760, according to the registers of burials:

Total at all ages. 0-1, -2, -3, -4, -5, -6, -7, -8, -9, -10, -15, -20, -25, -30.

6792 1376 1300 1290 898 603 381 301 189 109 78 126 54 39 31

The public health of Geneva altered very much for the better in the course of two centuries from 1561 to 1760. From 1561 to 1600, in every hundred children born, 30·9 died before nine months, on an annual average, and 50 before five years. From 1601 to 1700 the ratios were 27·7 under nine months, and 46 before five years. From 1701 to 1760 the deaths under nine months had fallen to 17·2 per cent., and under five years to 33·6 per cent. (Calculated from a table in the Bibliothèque Britannique, Sciences et Arts, IV. 327.) Thus, with an increasing probability of life, the age-incidence of fatal smallpox may have varied a good deal within the period from 1580 to 1760. It is given by Duvillard separately for the years 1700-1783 (inclusive of measles): during which limited period a smaller ratio died under nine months, and a larger ratio above the age of five years, than in the aggregate of the whole period from 1580 to 1760. Whatever may have been the rule at Geneva, it cannot be applied to English towns; for, while some 30 per cent. of the smallpox deaths were at ages above five in the Swiss city (1700-1783), only 12 per cent. were above five in English towns such as Chester and Warrington in 1773-4.

[830] Pyretologia, 2 vols. Lond. 1692-94, vol. II.

[831] Natural History of Oxfordshire. Oxford, 1677, p. 23.

[832] In his Diary, under the year 1646, homeward journey from Rome.

[833] The physician was “a very learned old man,” Dr Le Chat, who had counted among his patients at Geneva such eminent personages as Gustavus Adolphus and the duke of Buckingham.

[834] Dr Dover has left us an account of Sydenham’s practice in the smallpox as he himself experienced it: “Whilst I lived with Dr Sydenham, I had myself the smallpox, and fell ill on the twelfth day. In the beginning I lost twenty ounces of blood. He gave me a vomit, but I find by experience purging much better. I went abroad, by his direction, till I was blind, and then took to my bed. I had no fire allowed in my room, my windows were constantly open, my bedclothes were ordered to be laid no higher than my waist. He made me take twelve bottles of small beer, acidulated with spirit of vitriol, every twenty-four hours. I had of this anomalous kind to a very great degree, yet never lost my senses one moment.” The Ancient Physician’s Legacy. London, 1732, p. 114.

[835] Scotia Illustrata. Lib. II., cap. 10.

[836] De Febribus &c., Lond. 1657: cap. ix. “De Variolis et Morbillis,” p. 141.

[837] “First of all,” he says, “let the patient be kept with all care and diligence from cold air, especially in winter, so that the pores of the skin may be opened and the pocks assisted to come out. Therefore let him be kept in a room well closed, into which cold air is in no manner to enter, and let him be sedulously covered up in bed.... I desire the more to admonish my friends in this matter, for that Robert Cage, esquire, my dear sister’s husband,” etc.

[838] Besides cases to show the ill effects of blooding, vomits, purges and cooling medicines such as spirit of vitriol, he gives examples as if to refute Sydenham’s favourite notion that salivation, diarrhoea and menstrual haemorrhage were relieving or salutary. Morton’s chief object was to bring out the eruption, and to get it to maturate kindly; an eruption which languished, or did not rise and fill, was for him the most untoward of events. Sydenham, on the other hand, argued that the danger was in proportion to the number of pustules and to the total quantity of matter contained in them; and he sought, accordingly, to restrain cases which threatened to be confluent by an evacuant treatment or repressive regimen.

[839] Walter Lynn, M.B., A more easy and safe Method of Cure in the Smallpox founded upon Experiments, and a Review of Dr Sydenham’s Works, Lond. 1714; Some Reflections upon the Modern Practice of Physic in Relation to the Smallpox, Lond. 1715. F. Bellinger, A Treatise concerning the Smallpox, Lond. 1721.

[840] Letter from Woodward to the Weekly Journal, 20 June, 1719, in Nichols, Lit. Anecd. VI. 641.

[841] Rev. Dr Mangey to Dr Waller, 4 March, 1720, London. Nichols’ Lit. Anecd. I. 135.

[842] Huxham, Phil. Trans. XXXII. (1725), 379.

[843] Gent. Magaz., Sept. 1752.

[844] John Barker, M.D., Agreement betwixt Ancient and Modern Physicians, Lond. 1747. Also two French editions. It is on Van Helmont that Barker pours his scorn for “breaking down the two pillars of ancient medicine—bleeding and purging in acute diseases.” That upsetting person forbore to bleed even in pleurisy; the only thing that he took from the ancient medicine was a thin diet in fevers; “and yet this scheme, as wild and absurd as it seems, had its admirers for a time.”

[845] Lynn (u. s. 1714-15) agrees as to the matter of fact, namely, that the mortality from smallpox was greater among the richer classes, who were too much pampered and heated in their cure, than among the poorer, who had not the means to fee physicians and pay apothecaries’ bills.

[846] He was under the tutelage of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, who does not give a name to the malady (Coxe’s Life of Marlborough). Dr James Johnstone, junr., of Worcester, in his Treatise on the Malignant Angina, 1779, p. 78, claims the death of the Duke of Gloucester as from that cause, on the evidence of Bishop Kennet’s account.

[847] In the Gentleman’s Magazine, under the dates.

[848] A Direct Method of ordering and curing People of that Loathsome Disease the Smallpox, being the twenty years’ practical experience of John Lamport alias Lampard, London, 1685. The writer was probably an empiric, “Practitioner in Chyrurgery and Physick,” dwelling at Havant, and attending the George at Chichester on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the Half Moon at Petersfield on Saturdays. He says: “One great cause of this disease being so mortal in the country is because the infection doth make many physicians backward to visit such patients, either for fear of taking the disease themselves or transferring the infection to others.” He has another fling at the regular faculty: “Do not run madding to Dr Dunce or his assistance to be let bloud.” Empirics, although they were commonly right about blood-letting, were under the suspicion of not speaking the truth about their cures.

[849] Macaulay, History of England, IV. 532. The moving passage on the former horrors of smallpox, à propos of the death of Queen Mary in 1694, is familiar to most, but it may be cited once more in the context of a professional history: “That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid: but plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.” It is not given to us all to write like this; but it is possible that the loss of picturesqueness may be balanced by a gain of accuracy and correctness.

[850] Kellwaye, u. s., 1593.

[851] Dr Richard Holland in 1730 (A Short View of the Smallpox, p. 75), says: “A lady of distinction told me that she and her three sisters had their faces saved in a bad smallpox by wearing light silk masks during the distemper.”

[852] As I do not intend to come back to the subject of pockmarked faces, I shall add here that I have found nothing in medical writings of the 18th century, nor in its fiction or memoirs, to show that pockpitting was more than an occasional blemish of the countenance. At that time most had smallpox in infancy or childhood, when the chances of permanent marking would be less. The disappearance of pockpitted faces was discovered long ago. The report of the National Vaccine Board for 1822 says: “We confidently appeal to all who frequent theatres and crowded assemblies to admit that they do not discover in the rising generation any longer that disfigurement of the human face which was obvious everywhere some years since.” The members of this board were probably seniors who remembered the 18th century; and it is quite true that the first quarter of the 19th century was singularly free from smallpox in England except in the epidemic of 1817-19. But the above passage became stereotyped in the reports: exactly the same phrase, appealing to what they all remembered “some years since,” was used in the report for 1825, a year which had more smallpox in London than any since the 18th century, and again in the report for 1837, the first year of an epidemic which caused forty thousand deaths in England and Wales. These stereotyped reminiscences are apt to be as lasting a blemish as the pockholes themselves.

[853] Collinson, Hist. of Somerset, III. 226, citing Aubrey’s Miscellanies, 33.

[854] Blomefield, Hist. of Norfolk, III. 417.

[855] Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, ed. Whitaker. App. p. 151.

[856] Cal. Le Fleming MSS. p. 408 (Hist. MSS. Com.). There are also many references to smallpox from 1676 onwards in the letters of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, lately calendared for the Historical MSS. Commission.

[857] In the London Gazette of 11-14 May, 1674, the Vice-Chancellor and two doctors of medicine of the University of Cambridge contradicted by advertisement a report that smallpox and other infections were prevalent in the university.

[858] Marquis of Worcester to the Marchioness, [London] 8 June, 1675 (Beaufort MSS. Hist. MSS. Commis. XII. App. 9, p. 85): “They will have it heere that the smallpox and purple feaver is at the Bath, and the Dutchesse of Portsmouth puts off her journey upon it. The king askt me about it as soon as I came to towne. Pray enquire, and lett me know the truth.” The London Gazette of 17-21 June and 28 June-1 July, 1775, had advertisements “that it hath been certified under the hands of several persons of quality” that Bath and the country adjacent was wholly free of the plague or any other contagious distempers whatsoever.

[859] Burnet, History of his own Time, IV. 240.

[860] Walter Harris, M.D., De morbis acutis infantum. Ed. of 1720, p. 161.

[861] John Cury, M.D., An Essay on Ordinary Fever. Lond. 1743, p. 40.

[862] See p. 438.

[863] Macaulay hardly realized the anomalous character of the queen’s attack of smallpox. “The physicians,” he says, “contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that day. The disease was measles; it was scarlet fever; it was spotted fever; it was erysipelas.... Radcliffe’s opinion proved to be right.” There had been some doubt on the first appearance of the eruption whether it would turn to measles or smallpox. Sydenham says that it was often difficult to make the diagnosis at that stage, and in the queen’s case the first signs were anomalous as well. Next day, however, the eruption all over the body became “smallpox in its proper and distinct form.” But it did not long remain so; the livid spots, into which the pustules subsided, again raised doubts in the minds of some of the physicians whether it was not measles after all; and there was undoubtedly erysipelas of the face. Harris took the middle course of diagnosing “smallpox and measles mingled,” a name by which the form that we now call haemorrhagic smallpox had been known from the early part of the seventeenth century. It was at this late and ominous stage of the illness that Radcliffe was called in; it is not correct to say, as the historian says, that he was the first to pronounce “the more alarming name of smallpox.” The diagnosis was then a matter of little moment, for the queen was dying. He declared that “her majesty was a dead woman, for it was impossible to do any good in her case when remedies had been given that were so contrary to the nature of her distemper; yet he would endeavour to do all that lay in his power to give her ease.” (Munk’s Roll of the College of Physicians, II. 458.) For some unexplained reason Radcliffe was made to bear the blame of the queen’s death, an accusation which he deserved as little as he deserved the credit given him by the historian of having been the only physician to make the correct diagnosis.

Macaulay is equally unfortunate in his remark that smallpox “was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death,” in his comparison of it to plague, and in his rhetoric generally. The haemorrhagic form, of which the queen died, was rare. Dover adds it as a fourth variety, but admits that he had seen only five cases of it. Ferguson, of Aberdeen, as late as 1808, in a paper on measles (Med. and Phys. Journal, XXI. 359), described a haemorrhagic case of smallpox which he once saw, without knowing that it was a recognized variety of smallpox at all. However terrible a minister of death smallpox may sometimes have been, it happened that there was comparatively little of it in London during the period covered by Macaulay’s history; and it certainly did not “fill the churchyards,” as he might have found out by referring to that not altogether recondite source, the bills of mortality. From 1694 to 1700 fevers caused three and a half times more deaths than smallpox. In the year 1696, when “the distress of the common people was severe,” the smallpox deaths in London were 196, or about one-hundredth part of the mortality from all causes.

[864] Blomefield, III. 432. The following are two cases from the London epidemic of 1710: June, 15.—“Lord Ashburnham’s brother has the smallpox, and the first, concluding he had had it, went to him, and now himself very ill of them. Doctor Garth, who says none has them twice, examined the servants, and they tell him he was but six days ill then; so he concludes that was not the smallpox.” Cal. Belvoir MSS., II. 190.

[865] Lynn, u. s. He recalls a remark made by a writer in 1710 that the severity of that epidemic “was not due to a peculiar state of the air, but to a defect in some of our great physicians, who, being too fully employed, could not give due attendance to all or even to any of their patients through the multiplicity of them: for want of which, and the severity of their injunctions, which hindered others from applying anything in their absence, many persons were lost who might otherwise have been saved with due care.”

[866] John Woodward, M.D., The State of Physick and Diseases, with an inquiry into the causes of the late increase of them, but more particularly of the Smallpox; with some considerations on the new practice of purging in that disease. London, 1718.

[867] See the account of the Dispensary of the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane, in Munk’s Roll of the Coll. of Phys. II. 499, under the head of Sir Samuel Garth. The dispensary was started in 1687 and languished until 1724. The General Dispensary in Aldersgate Street was opened in 1770 with Dr Hulme as physician, and Dr Lettsom as additional physician in 1773.

[868] Letter of 27 March, year not given. Hist. MSS. Com. V. 618. See also the letter of 4 March, 1720, from Mangey to Waller, cited above, p. 450.

[869] Dr Philip Rose, of Bedfordbury (“over against a baker, next door to the Old Black Horse, two doors from Chandos Street, St Martin’s parish”), having been called by Lady Wyche to see her butler, pronounced him to be in the smallpox; whereupon the lady informed the physician that “she knew an eminent nurse who had managed above twenty of my Lord Cheyney’s servants in the smallpox, and every one of them had recovered.” Her butler was accordingly carried to this nurse’s house in a by street near Swallow Street. An Essay on the Smallpox. By Philip Rose, M.D. Lond. 1724, p. 18.

[870] “An Account or History of the Procuring the Small Pox by Incision, or Inoculation; as it has for some time been practised at Constantinople.” Being the Extract of a Letter from Emanuel Timonius, Oxon. et Patav. M.D., S.R.S., dated at Constantinople, December, 1713. Communicated to Phil. Trans. XXIX. (Jan.-March, 1714) 72, by Dr Woodward, Gresham Professor of Physic. Timoni had been in England in 1703, and had been incorporated a doctor of medicine at Oxford on his Padua degree: hence, perhaps, his correspondence.

[871] An Essay on External Remedies, Lond. 1715, p. 153. Kennedy settled in practice in London as an ophthalmic surgeon, and appears to have enjoyed the patronage of Arbuthnot. His other work, Ophthalmographia, or Treatise of the Eye and its Diseases, with appendix on Diseases of the Ear, Lond. 1723, which is dedicated to Arbuthnot, shows a knowledge of optics and of the structure of the parts concerned in operations on the eye.

[872] Sloane, Phil. Trans. XLIX. (1756), p. 516, “An Account of Inoculation given to Mr Ranby to be published, anno 1736.”

[873] Jacobus Pylarinus, Nova et Tuta Variolas excitandi per Transplantationem Methodus, nuper inventa et in usum tracta, qua rite peracta immunia in posterum praeservantur ab hujusmodi contagio corpora. Venetiis, 1715. Privilege dated 10 Nov., 1715. Reprinted in Phil. Trans. XXIX. (Jan.-March, 1716), p. 393.

[874] A Dissertation concerning Inoculation of Smallpox. By W. D[ouglass], Boston, 1730.

[875] loc. cit.

[876] Published under the initials J. C., M.D.

[877] De Peste dissertatio habita Apr. 17, 1721, cui accessit descriptio inoculationis Variolarum, a Gualt. Harris, Lond. 1721.

[878] Phil. Trans. XLIX. 104.

[879] Sloane, u. s., 1736.

[880] Jurin, Account of the Success of Inoculating the Smallpox. Annual reports from 1723 to 1726.

[881] Alexander Monro, primus, An Account of the Inoculation of the Smallpox in Scotland. Edin. 1765 (Reply to circular of queries issued by the dean and delegates of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris).

[882] Phil. Trans. 1722: papers by Perrot Williams, M.D. (p. 262), and Richard Wright (p. 267).

[883] Voyages du Sr. A. de la Motraye. Tome II. La Haye, 1727, Chap. III. p. 98. He saw Timoni at Constantinople on his return from the Caucasus. Timoni used “a three-edged surgeon’s needle,” which is more intelligible than three needles tied together. La Motraye’s travellers’ tales have not enjoyed the best credit. But this of the inoculation in Circassia has been made by Voltaire the sole basis of his spirited account of inoculation as the national practice of that country (Lettres sur les Anglais, Lettre XI. “Sur l’insertion de la petite-vérole,” 1727, reprinted as the article “Inoculation” in his Dict. Philosophique, 1764). There has never been a grosser instance of a myth constructed in cold blood. The fable does not need refutation because it is mere assertion, in the manner of a philosophe. But the British ambassador at Constantinople made inquiries concerning the alleged Georgian or “Circassian” practice in 1755, at the instance of Maty, the foreign secretary of the Royal Society (Phil. Trans. XLIX. 104). A Capuchin friar, “a grave sober man” who had returned shortly before from a sixteen years’ residence in Georgia and “gives an account of the virtues and vices, good and evil, of that country with plainness and candour,” solemnly declared to Mr Porter that he never heard of inoculation “at Akalsike, Imiritte or Tiflis,” and was persuaded that it had never been known in the Caucasus. It was impossible that either the public or private practice of inoculation could have been concealed from him, as he went in and out among the people practising physic. He had often attended them in the smallpox, which, he said, was unusually severe there. On the other hand La Motraye says: “I found the Circassians becoming more beautiful as we penetrated into the mountains. As I saw no one marked with the smallpox, it occurred to me to ask if they had any secret to protect them from the ravages which this enemy of beauty makes among all nations. They told me, Yes; and gave me to understand that it was inoculating, or communicating it to those whom they wished to preserve by taking the matter from one who had it and mixing the same with the blood at incisions which they made. On this I resolved to see the operation, if it were possible, and made inquiry in every village that we passed through if there was anyone about to have it done. I soon found an opportunity in a village named Degliad, where I heard that they were going to inoculate a young girl of four or five years old just as we were passing.” This was published fifteen years after, Timoni’s account being given in an Appendix.

[884] Travels, IV. 484. See also for Algiers, Lond. Med. Journ. XI. 141. In those cases there was no inoculation by puncture or otherwise.

[885] Miscell. Curiosa s. Ephemer. Med.-Phys. Acad. Nat. Curios. Decuria I., An. 2, Obs. CLXV. 1671. D. Thomae Bartholini, “Febris ex Imaginatione.” Scholion by D. Henr. Vollgnad, Vratislaviae practicus.

[886] Miscell. Curiosa, l. c. 1677.

[887] See Drage, Pyretologia. Lond. 1665.

[888] Nuremberg, 1662, p. 529.

[889] La Condamine cites Bartholin’s essay on Transplantation as if it really contained the germ of inoculation, which it does not, the single reference in it to smallpox being in a passage where the contagion of that, as well as of plague, syphilis and dysentery, is said to be capable of being turned aside from one to another.

[890] Drage (Pyretologia) gives a case where an ague passed from one person to another in the fumes of blood drawn in phlebotomy. He says also (Sicknesses and Diseases from Witchcraft, 1665, p. 21) that a witch could be made to take back a disease by scratching her and drawing blood.

[891] De Transplantatione Morborum. Hafniae, 1673, p. 24.

[892] De Febribus, u. s. In the plague, a live cock applied to the botch was thought to draw the venom; the cock was then to be buried. Also crusts of hot ryeloaf hung in the room where one had died of plague absorbed the venom. Gabelhover, The Boock of Physicke, Dort, 1599, p. 298. Bread was used for the same purpose in fevers as late as 1765. Muret, Mém. par la Société Econom. de Berne, 1766.

[893] Dissertationes in Inoculationem Variolarum, a J. à Castro, G. Harris, et A. le Duc. Lugd. Bat. 1722.

[894] Gardiner’s Triall of Tabacco. London, 1610, fol. 38.

[895] Ibid. fol. 43. The City Remembrancer, 1769, a work claiming to be Gideon Harvey’s, says that in the Great Plague of London, 1665, some low persons contracted the French pox of purpose to keep off the infection of plague.

[896] Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox, Chester, 1785:—“No care was taken to prevent the spreading; but on the contrary there seemed to be a general wish that all the children might have it.” Cited from Mr Edwards, surgeon, of Upton, near Chester. Again (Sketch of a Plan, &c., 1793, p. 491), “They neither feared it nor shunned it. Much more frequently, by voluntary and intentional intercourse, they endeavoured to catch the infection.”

[897] History of Physic, Lond. 1725-26, II. 288. This was written at a time when the novelty of inoculation had passed off, and may be taken as Freind’s mature opinion. Douglass, of Boston, writing in 1730, implies that Freind’s objections had been overcome; which may mean no more than he says in general: “Yet from repeated tryals the Anti-Inoculators do now acknowledge that inoculation, generally speaking, is a more easy way of undergoing the smallpox.” Condamine, in his French essay of 1755, counts Freind among the original supporters of inoculation, and ridicules the opposition to it. Munk, in citing the title of Wagstaffe’s Letter to Dr Freind showing the danger and uncertainty of Inoculating the Smallpox (London, 1722), omits the words “to Dr Freind,” at the same time describing the pamphlet as “specious.” There seems no reason to doubt that Freind shared Wagstaffe’s views.

[898] Hecquet, of Paris, who is supposed to have been the original of Dr Sangrado in ‘Gil Bias,’ gave the following reasons against inoculation (Raisons de doutes contre l’Inoculation): “Its antiquity is not sufficiently ascertained: the operation rests upon false facts: it is unjust, void of art, destitute of rules: ... it doth not prevent the natural smallpox: ... it bears no likeness to physic, and savours strongly of magic.”

[899] James Jurin, M.D., Account of the Success of Inoculation, 1724, p. 3.

[900] G. Baker, M.D., Oratio Harveiana, 1761, p. 24.

[901] Sloane, Phil. Trans. XLIX. 516.

[902] They are given in Maitland’s Vindication, 1722, and in one of Jurin’s papers.

[903] In regard to the last of them, when Frewen in 1759 was controverting the fancy of Boerhaave and Cheyne that smallpox might be hindered from coming on in a person exposed to contagion by a timely use of the Aethiops mineral, he said there was a fallacy in the evidence, because many persons ordinarily escape smallpox “who had been supposed to be in the greatest danger of taking it.” Huxham also pointed out that a person might be susceptible at one time but not at another, or insusceptible altogether; and the elder Heberden wrote: “Many instances have occurred to me which show that one who had never had the smallpox may safely associate, and even be in the same bed with a variolous patient for the first two or three days of the eruption without any danger of receiving the infection.” William Heberden, sen., M.D., Commentaries on Disease, 1802, p. 437.

[904] Dr James Jurin was educated at Cambridge, and elected a fellow of Trinity College. He became a schoolmaster at Newcastle, where he also gave scientific lectures. Coming to London, with a Leyden medical degree, he devoted himself to the Newtonian mathematics and was made one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, Newton being the president. He was one of the original physicians of the new hospital founded in the Borough by Guy, the rich bookseller. He made a fortune by medical practice, and was elected president of the College of Physicians a few weeks before he died. In medicine his name is associated with the inoculation statistics, the idea of which, as well as most of the substance, he got from Nettleton, and with “Jurin’s Lixivium Lithontripticum,” or solvent for the stone, the idea of which belonged originally to Mrs Johanna Stevens, and was sold by her to the State for five thousand pounds on the 16th of June, 1739, the prescriptions having been made public in the London Gazette of 19th June. On the 15th of December, 1744, Jurin was called to see the Earl of Orford (Sir Robert Walpole), who was suffering from stone, either renal or vesical. He began administering his alkaline solvent, “four times stronger than the strongest capital soap-lye,” and during the six weeks of his attendance had given his patient thirty-six ounces of it. Horace Walpole made him angry by arguing on the medicine: “It is of so great violence that it is to split a stone when it arrives at it, and yet it is to do no damage to all the tender intestines through which it must first pass. I told him I thought it was like an admiral going on a secret expedition of war with instructions which are not to be opened till he arrives in such a latitude.” (Letters of Horace Walpole, Cunningham, I. 339.) His services were at length dispensed with, and the earl, whose case was probably hopeless before, died in a few weeks. A war of pamphlets followed, Ranby, the serjeant-surgeon, maintaining that the patient had “died of the lixivium.” Mead, also, expressed himself strongly upon the attempt to use a modification of Mrs Stevens’s solvent.

[905] The fatalities are given somewhat fully in Jurin’s annual accounts of the Success of Inoculation, 1723-27.

[906] John Wreden, body-surgeon to the Prince of Wales, author of An Essay on the Inoculation of the Smallpox (Lond. 1779), may also be counted among those who gave a more real smallpox. See especially his cases at Hanover.

[907] H. Newman, “Way of Proceeding in the Smallpox Inoculation in New England.” Phil. Trans. XXXII. (1722), p. 33.

[908] Thomas Nettleton, Letter to Whitaker. Ibid. p. 39.

[909] Phil. Trans. l. c. p. 46. A remark follows which is not quite clear: “There is one observation which I have made, tho’ I would not yet lay any great stress upon it, that in families where any have been inoculated, those who have been afterwards seized never had an ill sort of smallpox, but always recovered very well.”

[910] Phil. Trans. 1722, p. 209. Dated from Halifax, 16 Dec. 1722.

[911] Dr William Douglass to Dr Cadwallader Colden, 28 July, 1721, and 1 May, 1722, in Massachu. Hist. Soc. Collections, Series 4, vol. II. pp. 166-9. Also A Dissertation concerning Inoculation of Smallpox. By W. D[ouglass]. Boston, 1730; and A Practical Essay concerning the Smallpox. By William Douglass, M.D. Boston, 1730.

[912] Boylston, Account of the Smallpox inoculated in New England. London, 1726.

[913] This was admitted, in a manner, for the great Boston epidemic of 1752, by the Rev. T. Prince, Gent. Magaz. Sept. 1753, p. 414. The epidemic attacked 5545 (in a population of 15,684), and cut off 569. The numbers inoculated were 2124 (including 139 negroes), of which number 30 died and were included in the total of 569. Many of the inoculated, says Prince, were not careful to avoid catching the infection in the natural way; “for I have known some, as soon as inoculated, receive visits from their friends, who had been with the sick of the same disease and ’tis likely carried infection with them; it seems highly probable that the inoculated received the infection from them into their vitals.” It may be supposed that the inoculated who were more careful formed a part of the 1843 who “moved out of town.” More than a third of the population took natural smallpox in some four months (April to July) of 1752, more than a third had had it before, a severe epidemic having occurred in 1730 as well as in 1721.

[914] Clinch, Rise and Progress of the Smallpox, with an Appendix to prove that Inoculation is no Security from the Natural Smallpox. 2nd ed. 1725.

[915] C. Deering, M.D., An Account of an Improved Method of treating the Smallpox. Nottingham, 1736, p. 27. Woodville appears to accept this case as authentic.

[916] Pierce Dod, M.D., F.R.S., Several Cases in Physic. London, 1746.

[917] Kirkpatrick, and after him Woodville, treat the alleged experience of Jones as pure fiction.

[918] La Condamine, of Paris, an amateur enthusiast for inoculation, did all he could to upset the case. He got his friend Dr Maty, foreign secretary of the Royal Society, to make inquiry through the British ambassador to the Porte. It happened that Angelo Timoni, son of the inoculator, was at that time an interpreter at the British Embassy; he applied to his mother, who re-affirmed the facts as to the inoculation of her child in infancy, and her death by the natural smallpox twenty-four years after. The only defence left was that the inoculation had not been done by Dr Timoni’s own hand. La Condamine, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de l’Inoculation. 2me Mémoire. Paris, 1768.

[919] Rush to Lettsom, Philadelphia, 17 June, 1808, in Pettigrew’s Memoirs of Lettsom, III. 201.

[920] Fuller, in his Exanthematalogia, makes a somewhat late defence of it in 1729. But Richard Holland, who published in 1730 A Short View of the Smallpox, does not mention inoculation, and in the following passage he writes of smallpox as if the extravagant hopes of the preceding years had vanished: “This last season having afforded too many melancholy instances of the fatal effects of the distemper, though under the care and direction of the most eminent physicians, since the disease, notwithstanding the plainness of its symptoms, is become the opprobrium medicinae,” &c. (p. 3).

[921] Phil. Trans. Jan.-March, 1722: “The way of proceeding in the Small Pox inoculated in New England.” Communicated by Henry Newman, Esq. of the Middle Temple, p. 33, § 3: “Yet we find the variolous matter fetched from those that have the inoculated smallpox altogether as agreeable and effectual as any other.”

[922] An Essay on Inoculation: occasioned by the Smallpox being brought into S. Carolina in the year 1738. By J. Kilpatrick. London, 1743, p. 50. The essay had been “first printed in South Carolina,” the London edition of 1743 having an Appendix dealing historically with the Charleston epidemic of 1738.