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
In the last thirty years of the 18th century the accounts of fever in
England became more detailed as to its circumstances, and more numerically
precise. I shall accordingly bring together all that I can find relevant
to fever in London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Chester, and thereafter in
those towns, such as Manchester, Leeds, and others in the North, which
were specially touched in their public health by the movement known as the
Industrial Revolution.
Typhus Fever in London, 1770-1800.
In the London bills of mortality the item of fevers diminishes steadily
during the latter part of the 18th century, the deaths from all causes
diminish, the births come nearer to the number of the deaths, and in three
years of the last decade they exceed them. This statistical result is
doubtless roughly correct; but the bills were becoming more and more
inadequate to the whole metropolitan area; and even for the original
parishes which they included they have not the same value for fever in the
later period as they had for plague at their beginning[236]. On the other
hand, from about the year 1770 we begin to have more exact medical
accounts of fever in London, which are not indeed numerically exhaustive,
but good as samples of what was going on. Whatever improvement there was
in the prevalence of typhus fever touched the richer classes. The Paving
Act of 1766 is credited with having improved the health of the City, and
there were many new streets and squares being built in the west end that
were, of course, free from typhus. It is to these desirable residential
quarters that the eulogies of Sir John Pringle[237], Dr John Moore[238]
and others apply. The slums of London were as yet unimproved, and but
little known to the physicians. Lettsom, who was one of the first of his
class to visit among the poor in their homes, has much to say of typhus
fever; but he is emphatic that it was nearly all an infection of the poor.
“In the airy parts of this city,” he writes in 1773, “and in large, open
streets, fevers of a putrid tendency rarely arise.... In my practice I
have attentively observed that at least forty-eight out of fifty of these
fevers have existed in narrow courts and alleys.” The same is remarked by
Currie for Liverpool, by Clark for Newcastle, by Percival and Ferriar for
Manchester, by Haygarth for Chester, and by Heysham for Carlisle.
The quarters of the rich had gradually become detached from those of the
poor. I have shown this more especially for Chester, where the old walls
made a clear division; but it was general in the second half of the 18th
century[239].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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