Dr John Alderson of Hull wrote in 1788 an essay on the contagion of fever, in which there are no authentic details for Hull: “The calamity itself is the constant complaint of every neighbourhood, and almost every newspaper presents us with an example of the direful consequences of infection”--the reference being to gaols more particularly[274]. Whatever was the reason, there was undoubtedly a great deal of typhus in England in the eighties of the eighteenth century. Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire experienced much typhus from 1782 to 1785, although we have few particulars. “The remembrance of its ravages at Gloucester, Worcester and Marlborough,” says Dr Wall of Oxford, “is still fresh in every mind, where its virulence proved so peculiarly fatal to the medical world.” At Aylesbury, Dr Kennedy survived an attack of the “contagious fever,” to write an account (1785) of the epidemic, which he traced to the gaol (the date, be it observed, is subsequent to Howard’s visitations)[275]. At Maidstone, also, in 1785, the gaol fever was the subject of a special account[276]. At Worcester in 1783 the younger Dr Johnstone caught typhus while visiting the gaol, which was thereafter rebuilt at great expense. A prisoner took it to Droitwich where 14 died[277]. Dr Wall gives clinical details of fifteen cases of typhus treated by him in private practice at Oxford in 1785; one of his patients was an apothecary whose business had exposed him very much to the influence of contagion, as he was much employed amongst the poor in the suburbs of the town and neighbouring villages and in the House of Industry[278]. In the year 1783-85, much of the epidemic fever was of the nature of ague, as described in another chapter. It is not always easy to separate it from typhus; but there is no doubt that both were prevalent together. Thus in the parish of Painswick, Gloucestershire, in the spring of 1785 there occurred both “a contagious fever” and an “epidemic ague,” the latter having left a good many persons dropsical and cachectic[279]. This had been part of an epidemical fever which had raged for some time in the county of Gloucestershire, and is said to have lately carried off a great number of poor. At Norton, within five miles of Gloucester, there lived in two adjoining tenements two families: in one a man and his wife and three children, in the other a man and his wife, of whom only one remained alive on the 1st of March, 1785[280].