Intermittent fever, which in the middle of the fifteenth century and long afterwards recurred like the plague periodically but more frequently, and which often raged as universally, which was sometimes so mortal that the living could hardly bury the dead, and which spared not even the throne, for James I. and Oliver Cromwell both died of ague contracted in London—that formidable disease is gone. Ague, it is true, still exists in the fenny and marshy places which yet remain in England, and we occasionally see a case contracted there in the wards of the London Fever Hospital, but I have not seen a single case of ague contracted in London for upwards of a quarter of a century. Remittent fever is also gone, scurvy is gone, rickets is gone, malignant sore throat is gone, typhus-gravior is gone, and if small-pox is not gone it is entirely the consequence of our own apathy and folly. No less remarkable is the gradual decline and the ultimate cessation of certain forms of bowel-complaint of a very painful nature, the very names of which have long disappeared both from medical and popular language. In the 17th century the deaths from two of these diseases alone registered in the Bills of Mortality under two separate titles, were never less than 1000 annually, and in some years they exceeded 4000; but from having been 1070 in the year 1700, they decreased through each successive decade of that century in the following remarkable progression: 770, 706, 350, 150, 110, 80, 70, 40, 20; and they have so entirely disappeared during the 19th century, that, as I have just said, their very names are no longer in use. Moreover several acute diseases which hardly come under the name of Epidemics, such as Rheumatic Fever, Pneumonia, and Peripneumonia, are much less frequent and fatal now than they were a century ago. All this time there has been a continually decreasing mortality. In 1700 the estimated mortality of England and Wales was 1 in 39; in 1750 it was 1 in 40; in 1801 it was 1 in 44; in 1810 it was 1 in 49; in 1820 it was 1 in 55, and in 1830 it was 1 in 58. In London in 1700[22] the deaths were 1 in 25; in 1750, 1 in 21;[23] in 1801, 1 in 35; in 1810, 1 in 38; and in 1830, 1 in 45. Footnote 22: parliamentary Returns, 1811. Footnote 23: It is conceived that the remarkable increase of the mortality in the middle of this century was mainly caused by the abuse of spirituous liquors, which was checked about that time by the imposition of high duties.—_Sir Gilbert Blane’s Dissertations._ The diminishing number of those who are born merely to die exhibits the decrease of mortality in a still more striking point of view. The estimated mortality of persons under twenty years of age in London in 1780 was 1 in 76; in 1801 it was 1 in 96; in 1830 it was 1 in 124; in 1833 it was 1 in 137; not much more than one-half the proportion who died under twenty half a century ago.