Early in the summer of 1818 an epidemic of continued fever appeared in a manufacturing village seven miles from Lintrathen; it attacked at first young and plethoric subjects, and ran through whole families. In August it reached Lintrathen parish, in which one practitioner had forty cases, with no deaths. The fever was of an inflammatory nature; the bulk of the cases fell in October, and were nearly all of young women. They were bled to syncope, which then meant usually to 32 ounces. There was a prejudice against blooding among the old people, who said “they had had many fevers, and in their time no such thing was ever allowed.” But, according to the doctor, this withholding of the lancet had the effect of protracting their illnesses: “they toasted sick for six weeks, and were often confined to bed for months[328].” The epidemic of 1817-19 brought into prominence two questions, the one theoretical, the other practical. The theoretical question (not debated at the time) was touching the place or affinities of relapsing fever in the nosology. Christison maintained that it was the inflammatory fever, or _synocha_ of Cullen, showing a peculiar tendency to relapse. The fever of the same epidemic period in England was also undoubtedly a fever of strong or inflammatory reaction, corresponding to Cullen’s definition of _synocha_, but it relapsed much less frequently than in Ireland and Scotland in the same years. Even in Ireland and Scotland there were always many cases of “relapsing fever” which did not relapse. The law of its relapses was reduced to great simplicity by a physician learned in fevers, Dr John O’Brien, in the Dublin epidemic of 1827. The bulk of that epidemic was a fever of short periods--three, five, seven or nine days, most of the attacks ending on the fifth or seventh night of the fever. The attack being ended in a free perspiration, there might or might not happen, after an interval, a relapse, and again a relapse after that, or even a third. The five-days’ fever was more liable to relapse than the seven-days’ fever, the seven-days’ fever more liable than the nine-days’ fever, the fevers of the longest periods not liable at all. In other words, the sooner the patient “got the cool,” by a night’s sweating, the more liable he was to have one or more relapses[329].