A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present TimeCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
vehement in its access, with lassitude, and pain in the head and back;
unrelieving sweats are again mentioned, with dry tongue, delirium,
coma-vigil, and death about the 14th-15th day. Fothergill was at a loss to
know whether he should order blood to be drawn, owing to the low depressed
nature of the fever. In February, 1755, the fever is still “too much of
the nature of those which prevailed in the preceding months to allow a
repetition of bleeding.” In April it is called the petechial and miliary
fever, the miliary eruption being of a white sort with a very noisome
scent; the petechial spots turned livid, black and gangrenous; few
patients escaped who had been sweated at the beginning. The fever was
truly malignant, the patient restless from the outset, the sweats
weakening. Fothergill’s last entries of it are important, under the months
of May and June, 1755. In May, 1755, the fevers were “for the most part
allied to that dangerous remittent which has for some years past more or
less prevailed in different places of this kingdom.” In June: “It does not
appear that either in the hospitals or any part of the city a disease has
broken out of so dangerous a nature as has been reported. The same kind of
fever that has long continued in this city with some small variations in
its type, still remains, but it is by no means more frequent than it has
been in the preceding months, nor is it attended with more unfavourable
symptoms.”
It is impossible to say how general over England this fever may have been
in the years 1751-57. Our fullest accounts come from Worcestershire; but
the putrid fever is heard of more widely. Thus a short Latin piece in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, dated 14 April, 1755, is on the putrid fever
lately epidemic, and not yet extinct, in some parts of the county of
Somerset and adjoining places; its signs were contagiousness, pains of the
head and loins, nausea and vomiting, diarrhoea, quick weak pulse, purple
spots, delirium and coma[214]. Grainger, writing from Edinburgh in 1753,
declares his motive for publishing an account of the anomalous fever of
the Netherlands in 1746-48 to be that the same had lately been raging over
almost the whole of Britain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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