A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time — John Shaqi
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
But, although Sydenham must have had the same phenomena of fever before
him that Willis had, the epidemic being general, according to the
statements of both, one would hardly guess from his way of presenting the
facts, that the fever was what Willis took it to be--a slow nervous fever,
with convulsive and ataxic symptoms, specially affecting children and the
young. Both Willis and Sydenham recognised something new in it; the common
people called it, once more, the “new disease,” and Pepys calls it a “sort
of fever,” and “strange and fatal fevers.”
As Sydenham maintains that the same epidemic constitution continued until
1664 (although the fever-deaths in London are much fewer in 1662-3-4 than
in the year 1661, which was the first of it), we may take in the same
connexion Pepys’s account of the Queen’s attack of fever in 1663. The
young princess Katharine of Portugal, married to Charles II. in 1662, had
the beginning of a fever at Whitehall about the middle of October, 1663;
Pepys enters on the 19th that her pulse beat twenty to eleven of the
king’s, that her head was shaved, and pigeons put to her feet, that
extreme unction was given her (the priests so long about it that the
doctors were angry). On the 20th he hears that the queen’s sickness is a
spotted fever, that she was as full of the spots as a leopard: “which is
very strange that it should be no more known, but perhaps it is not so.”
On the 22nd the queen is worse, 23rd she slept, 24th she is in a good way
to recovery, Sir Francis Prujean’s cordial having given her rest; on the
26th “the delirium in her head continues still; she talks idle, not by
fits, but always, which in some lasts a week after so high a fever, in
some more, and in some for ever.” On the 27th she still raves and talks,
especially about her imagined children; on the 30th she continues
“light-headed, but in hopes to recover.” On 7th December, she is pretty
well, and goes out of her chamber to her little chapel in the house; on
the 31st “the queen after a long and sore sickness is become well again.”
Typhus fever perennial in London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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