The years 1678-1680 witnessed remarkable epidemics of ague, such as had occurred on several occasions before, the last in the years 1657-59. They engross so much of Sydenham’s writing, especially in connexion with the Peruvian-bark controversy, that we hear little of any other fever until the great epidemic of continued fever, or typhus, in 1685-6. But he does mention briefly that the interval between the decline of the agues in 1680 and the beginning of the “new fever” of 1685, was occupied by “continued depuratory” fevers--depuratory of the dregs of the preceding intermittent constitution, and comparable in that respect to the fevers of 1661-64 which followed the agues of 1657-59[29]. Sydenham’s term “depuratory” does not help us much; but we learn something from Morton as to what fevers were prevalent, besides the epidemical intermittents, in the years preceding the epidemic of 1685-86. Morton classes them as continued συνεχής (_Synocha_), by which he means something less malignant than _Synochus_. A fever which began in the milder form would often degenerate into the more malignant, the cause assigned, in the usual recriminatory manner of the time between rival schools, being mistaken treatment. But sometimes the fever was malignant from the outset, with purple spots, petechiae, morbillous efflorescence, watery vesicles on the neck and breast, buboes, and anthraceous boils. All these fevers, says Morton, whether they were spurious forms of synocha, or malignant from the outset, were sporadic, “neque contagione, ut in pestilentiali constitutione, sese propagabant[30].” This points to their having been part of that strange aguish epidemic of which an account is given in another chapter. In Short’s abstracts of parish registers, the year 1680 seems to have been the most unhealthy of the series in country parishes, and that is borne out by one Lamport, or Lampard, an empiric who practised in Hampshire: “I will tell you somewhat concerning a malignant fever. In the year ’80 or ’81 there were great numbers of people died of such fevers, many whereby were taken with vomitings, etc., yet I had the good fortune to cure eighteen in the parish of Aldingbourn, not one dying, in that great compass, of that disease[31].” The moral is that the empiric recovered his cases, whereas the regular faculty lost theirs; which means that the fevers were of various degrees, some aguish, some typhus, as in the exactly similar circumstances a century after, 1780-85.