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
Sydenham says that a continued fever, the symptoms of which so far as he
gives them suggest typhus, was mixed with the masked intermittent, (or the
convulsive fever of children, as in Willis’s account), in every one of the
years 1661-4; and that statement raises a question which may be dealt with
here once for all. Fever in the London bills is a steady item from year to
year, seldom falling below a thousand deaths and in the year 1741, during
a general epidemic of typhus, rising to 7500. The fevers were a composite
group, as we have seen, and shall see more clearly. But the bulk of them
perennially appears to have been typhus fever. Where the name of “spotted
fever” is given there can be little doubt. Every year the bills have a
small number of deaths from “spotted fever,” and the number of them
always rises in the weekly bills in proportion to the increase of “fever”
in general, sometimes reaching twenty in the week when the other fevers
reach a hundred. It would be a mistake to suppose that only the fevers
called spotted were typhus, the other and larger part being something
else. The more reasonable supposition is that the name of spotted was
given by the searchers in cases where the spots, or vibices or petechiae
of typhus were especially notable. If a score, or a dozen or half-a-dozen
deaths in a week are set down to spotted fever, it probably means that a
large part of the remaining hundred, or seventy, or fifty cases of “fever”
not called spotted were really of the same kind, namely typhus. In the
plague itself, the “tokens,” which were of the same haemorrhagic nature as
the larger or more defined spots of typhus, were exceedingly variable[19].
One of the synonyms of typhus (the common name in Germany) is spotted
typhus; but the spots were of at least two kinds, a dusky mottling of the
skin and more definite spots, sometimes large, sometimes like fleabites.
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