The great outburst of typhus at Carlisle began in the end of March, 1781, with no very obvious special provocation[260]. Upwards of 600 had typhus to February 7th, 1782, at which date 12 or 15 were still suffering from it. The deaths were less than 1 in 10 of all attacked: viz. 2 in May, 4 in June, 8 in July, 8 in August, 7 in September, 9 in October, 8 in November, 6 in December, and 3 in January, 1782, a total of 55. Of this total of fatal cases, 3 were boys, 4 bachelors, and 15 husbands: 3 girls, 2 maids, 22 wives, and 6 widows. Two-thirds of all the deaths were of married people; Heysham saw no case in a child under three years. It affected about a tenth part of the inhabitants of Carlisle (6299), and raged most among the lower class who lived in narrow, close, confined lanes and in small crowded apartments, of which there were a great many in Carlisle, generally going through all the inmates of a house where it had once begun. On seeking to trace the origin of the epidemic, he found that it began in the end of March, 1781, in a house in Richard-gate, which contained about half-a-dozen very poor families. Every window that could be spared was shut up, to save the window-tax. The surgeon who attended some of these poor wretches told Dr Heysham that the smell was so offensive that it was with difficulty he could stay in the house. One of the typhus patients in this house was a weaver, who, on his recovery, went to the large workshop where he worked, and there, it was supposed, gave the infection (in his clothes) to his fellow workmen, by whom new centres of infection were made in various other houses. In August, a young man just recovered from the fever went to his mother’s in the small village of Rockliffe, four or five miles from Carlisle, to get back his strength in the country air; his mother soon took the fever and died, and a neighbour woman who came to her in her sickness likewise caught it and died. These were all the cases known in the village, and they show the enormously greater fatality of typhus in those not inured to its atmosphere and conditions. The state of population and health at Warrington was peculiar, and is given fully in another chapter. There could be no more striking instance of the growth of what the foreign writers call the proletariat; an old market-town, with a small sail-cloth industry from Elizabethan times, it became a busy weaving town owing to the demand for sail-cloth during the war with the American colonies. The whole population of some 9000 men, women and children, were wage-earners; the women were all the while unusually prolific, and the sacrifice of infant life was enormous, especially by smallpox. We have no particular accounts of fevers; but in the bill of mortality for 1773, the year of a disastrous smallpox epidemic, there were 25 deaths from fever, of which 10 were of “worm fever,” or the remittent of children[261].