It is not easy to make out what were the circumstances of the time that led to the supersession of simple continued fever (or relapsing fever in Ireland and Scotland), by spotted fever or typhus gravior in all parts of the kingdom. Sydenham would have looked, among other things, to the weather and the character of seasons; but from 1830 onwards there was no season so notable as the dry and hot summer of 1826, although the end of the year 1836 was remarkably wet. The period of typhus gravior was a time of much sickness of other kinds--the Asiatic cholera of 1831-32, the influenza of 1831, 1833, and 1836-37, and the general unhealthiness of the year 1837. This was also the decade when the “condition-of-England question” was a common topic, a time of strikes and of much distress among the working classes, as shown in the reports of the Poor Law Commission. In Glasgow there was a considerable prevalence of fevers year after year from the relapsing-fever epidemic of 1827-29, according to the following table of admissions for fever to the Royal Infirmary and the special fever-hospitals[359]: _Admissions for Fever, Glasgow._ Year Fever cases 1827 1084 1828 1511 1829 865 1830 729 1831 1657 1832 {1589 {1148[360] 1833 1288 1834 2003 1835 1359 1836 3125 1837 5387[361] 1838 2047 1839 1529 The worst year of the series for fever was 1837, and the worst month of that year was May, when the fever-deaths were 1 in 3·22 of the mortality from all causes. That great access of fever in Glasgow followed immediately upon the great strike of the cotton-spinners, on 8th April, 1837, by which eight thousand persons, mostly women, were thrown out of work[362]. The death-rate in Glasgow was in those years as high as anywhere in the kingdom, and was higher in the nine years from 1831 than in the nine years preceding. The population of Glasgow, says Cowan, had increased on the industrial side, out of proportion to its middle and wealthiest class[363]; and to that he would attribute the higher death-rates in the second period (right-hand side), of the following table: _Glasgow Death-rates._ 1822-1830 | 1831-1839 | Death-rate Death-rate | Death-rate Death-rate over all. under five.| over all. under five. Year One in One in | Year One in One in 1822 44·4 101 | 1831 33·8 79 1823 36·4 78 | 1832 21·67 63 1824 37·0 81 | 1833 35·7 77 1825 36·3 81 | 1834 36·3 81 1826 40·6 105 | 1835 32·6 67 1827 37·0 84 | 1836 28·9 62 1828 33·0 79 | 1837 24·6 65 1829 37·9 100 | 1838 37·9 83 1830 41·5 97 | 1839 36·1 72