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
At Halifax in the summer of 1818, typhus (or relapsing fever) had
increased so much that fever-wards were added to the Dispensary. It had
been alarmingly fatal in a high-lying village near Settle. It was
prevalent in Ripon, Huddersfield and Wakefield; and had been brought from
Leeds to Atley. A Bradford physician visited 27 cases of fever in one day
at a neighbouring village. Throughout Yorkshire, it was confined to the
lower orders, and was not very fatal[316]. At Carlisle it began about
July, 1817, and became somewhat frequent in the winter and spring
following; of 457 cases treated from the Dispensary 46 died, or 1 in
10[317]. At Newcastle, a mild typhus (typhus mitior) broke out in the
autumn of 1816, not in the poorer quarters, but mostly among the domestics
of good houses in elevated situations. There was much privation at
Newcastle, as elsewhere, at this time, among the poor. Murchison takes
this fever of the autumn of 1816 at Newcastle to have been enteric or
typhoid; but it is described as a simple continued fever, with vertigo,
headache, and bloodshot eyes, lasting from five or six days to four or
five weeks, ending usually without a marked crisis, and causing few
deaths[318]. The epidemic continued in Newcastle for three years, the
admissions to the Fever Hospital from 4 Sept. 1818, to 4 March, 1819,
having been 160, with 12 deaths. Dr McWhirter wrote, in April, 1819, that
he saw on his rounds as dispensary physician “too many of the obvious
causes of fever,” including the filth and wretchedness of the poor
inhabitants: “one rather wonders that so many escape it than that some are
its victims[319].”
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