1685|Constitution of a | 23,222| 0| 3,832 | 2,496 | 197 | 1686| “new” continued fever. | 22,609| 0| 4,185 | 1,062 | 25 | -------- |Griping | in the | Guts | |------- | 1,061 | 835 | 866 | 1,146 | | 1,288 | 676 | | 2,108 | 2,415 | | 4,385 | | 3,690 | 2,537 | 2,645 | | 2,624 | 1,777 | 3,321 | 2,083 | | 2,602 | | 3,150 | 2,996 | 3,271 | | | 2,827 | 2,631 | 2,438 | 2,981 | | 2,203 | 2,605 The foregoing is a Table of Sydenham’s epidemic constitutions from 1661 to 1686, compiled from his various writings, with the corresponding statistics from the London Bills of Mortality. I give this Table both as a convenient outline and in deference to the great name of Sydenham. But we should be much at fault in interpreting the figures of the London Bills, or the history of epidemic diseases in the country at large, if we had no other sources of information than his writings. Only some of the figures in the Table concern us in this chapter; plague has been finished in the previous volume, smallpox, measles and “griping in the guts” are reserved each for a separate chapter, as well as the influenzas and epidemic agues which formed the chief part of the “strange” or “new” fevers. If this work had been the Annals of Epidemics in Britain, it would have been at once proper and easy to follow Sydenham’s constitutions exactly, and to group under each year the information collected from all sources about all epidemic maladies. But as the work is a history, it proceeds, as other histories do, in sections, observing the chronological order and the mutual relations of epidemic types as far as possible; and in this section of it we have to cull out and reduce to order the facts relating to fevers, beginning with those of 1661. Cases of fever, says Sydenham, began to be epidemic about the beginning of July 1661, being mostly tertians of a bad type, and became so frequent day by day that in August they were raging everywhere, and in many places made a great slaughter of people, whole families being seized. This was not an ordinary tertian intermittent; indeed no one but Sydenham calls it an intermittent at all, and he qualifies the intermittence as follows: