The long period of comparative immunity from typhus near the beginning of the 19th century was first broken, both in Great Britain and in Ireland, by the very severe winter of 1814-15; but it was not until the great depression of trade following the peace of 1815 (which made a difference of forty millions sterling a year in the public expenditure) and the bad harvest of 1816 that typhus fever and relapsing fever became truly epidemic, chiefly in Ireland but also in Scotland and England. The lesson of the history is unmistakable: with all the inducements to typhus from neglect of sanitation in the midst of rapidly increasing numbers, there was surprisingly little of the disease so long as trade was brisk and the means of subsistence abundant. The reckoning came in the thirty years following the Peace. In London, says Bateman[307], the epidemic began in the autumn of 1816, before the influence of scarcity was acutely felt, in the courts about Saffron Hill, the same locality in which he mentioned fever in the winter of 1813-14 among the poor Irish. But this means little more than that the Irish, whether in Ireland or out of it, are the first to feel the effects of scarcity in producing fever. At the very same time that it began among them in Saffron Hill, it began among some young people at a silk factory in Spitalfields. In March, 1817, there was a good deal more of it in Saffron Hill, as well as among the silk-weavers in Essex Street, Whitechapel, in Old Street, in Clerkenwell, and in Shadwell workhouse. Many poor-houses, and especially those of Whitechapel, St Luke’s, St Sepulchre’s and St George’s, Southwark, were getting crowded in 1817 with half-starved persons, among whom fever was rife in the summer and autumn. There was also much of it in the homes of working people in the eastern, north-eastern and Southwark parishes, with more occasional infected households in Shoe Lane, Clare Market, Somers Town and St Giles’s in the Fields (“in the filthy streets between Dyot Street and the end of Oxford Street”)[307]. The hospitals and dispensaries were fully occupied with fever, and the new House of Recovery in Pancras Road, with accommodation for seventy patients, was soon full. At the Guardian Asylum for young women, more than half of the forty inmates were seized with the fever in one week. The cases were on the whole milder than in ordinary years; of 678 admitted to the House of Recovery in 1817, fifty died or 1 in 13·5. In two-thirds of these patients the fever lasted two weeks or to the beginning of the third week; of the remaining third, a few lost the fever on the 7th, 8th or 9th day, a larger number on the 12th to the 14th day, while a considerable number kept it to the end of the third week or beginning of the fourth. Of the whole 678, only 75 had a free perspiration, and in only 19 of these was the perspiration critical so as to end the fever abruptly. The fever relapsed in 54 of the 678, a