Throughout England, in country parishes and in towns, the first ten years of the 18th century were on the whole a period of good public health. In Short’s abstracts of the parish registers to show the excess of deaths over the births, those years are as little conspicuous as any in the long series. It was a time when there was a great lull in smallpox, and probably also in fevers. The figures for Sheffield may serve as an example[90]. It will be seen from the Table that the burials exceeded the baptisms in every decade from the Restoration to the end of the century; after that for twenty years the baptisms exceeded the burials, the marriages having increased greatly. _Vital Statistics of Sheffield._ Ten-year periods Marriages Baptisms Burials 1661-70 585 2086 2266 1671-80 537 2240 2387 1681-90 540 2595 2856 1691-1700 688 2221 2856 1701-10 942 3033 2613 1711-20 991 3304 2765 Of particular epidemics, we hear of a malignant fever at Harwich in 1709. Harwich was then an important naval station, and the fever may have arisen in connexion with the transport of troops to and from the seat of war, just as camp- and war-fevers appeared at various ports in the next war, 1742-48. There were rumours of a plague at Newcastle in 1710, which were contradicted by advertisement in the _London Gazette_[91]. But, as there was so much plague in the Baltic ports in 1710 it is possible that the Newcastle rumour may have been one of plague imported, and not a rumour suggested by the mortality from some other disease. To the same period of epidemic fever in London, about 1709-10, belongs also a curiously localized epidemic in an Oxford college, which reminds one somewhat of the circumstances of enteric fever in our time. It was told to Dr Rogers of Cork twenty-five or twenty-six years before the date of his writing (1734), by one who was a student at Oxford then: “There broke out amongst the scholars of Wadham College a fever very malignant, that swept away great numbers, whilst the rest of the colleges remained unvisited. All agreed that the contagious infection arose from the putrefaction of a vast quantity of cabbages thrown into a heap out of the several gardens near Wadham College[92].”