The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827Various
Science
The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
We allude principally here to the localities and the facts, as they
are now before us; circumstances and events which seem to us of the
greatest importance, as enforcing the value of the details which he
has collected, and as holding out warnings to the people respecting
the preservation of their healths, in addition to those which the
work before us has given in describing the soils or characters of
ground in England from which this destructive poison is generated.
And before we proceed to the analysis of his book, we shall state
what those are, or at least a few of them, while wondering that he
should have overlooked them, or regretting that any fancies should
have prevented him from stating what would have been of so much
utility. [p101]
It is notorious that, in the last autumn, the remittent fevers in
various parts of the country amounted to a species of pestilence,
such as has scarcely been known in England from this cause, or we
might almost indeed say, from any other disease since the days of
Sydenham. Wherever ague had ever existed, or even been supposed
possible, in those places was this fever found: so that in all the
well-known tracts in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Essex,
Sussex, Hampshire, and so forth, there was scarcely a house without
one or more inhabitants under fever, while the event, as might be
suspected, was a considerable mortality. In the parish of Marston,
in Lincolnshire, for example, it amounted to 25 in 300 inhabitants;
in some other places, it reached one in sixteen, one in thirteen,
one in nine. And so extensive was its range, that even Hastings did
not escape; while it should be almost superfluous to say that every
other town on the sea-coast was so much infested by it, that they
who resorted to them for bathing, as usual, found themselves most
awkwardly situated, and also suffered in considerable numbers.
To come nearer home, and to what must interest us of the metropolis
more, the same fevers were extremely abundant in various parts of
the outskirts of London, as also in the villages or towns which are
connected with it, within a range of from six to ten miles. Not
to enumerate all these, this was the case throughout the range of
streets or houses which extends from Buckingham Gate to Chelsea; in
which long line, it is said, that almost every house had a patient
or more under this fever; though, as the author has truly observed,
these were mistaken for typhus, or at least thus misnamed. Thus it
was also about Vauxhall and Lambeth; and to a great extent among
all that scattered mixture of town and country which follows from
Whitechapel, from Bishopsgate, and so forth, and very particularly
along Ratcliffe Highway, and so on, to an indefinite range along
the river, not only on this side but on the opposite one, so as
to include Rotherhithe, and then proceeding onward to Deptford,
Greenwich, Woolwich, Plumstead, so as to carry us beyond the boundary
which we proposed to notice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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