The meaning of all this is obvious on turning to the London weekly, bills of mortality. In the months of August and September for three years in succession, 1678-80, the deaths from “griping in the guts” and from “convulsions” rose greatly. These were, indeed, three successive seasons of fatal diarrhoea, mostly infantile, as I shall show in the chapter on that disease.

The following extracts from the London weekly bills of mortality show how “fevers,” as well as other diseases, contributed to the great rise in the autumns of 1678, 1679, and 1680.

Autumnal London Mortality in 1678.

1678

Summer and Autumnal London Mortality in 1679.

1679

(For the Influenza weeks, see former Table.)

Autumnal London Mortality in 1680.

1680

The last of the three autumnal seasons, 1680, is one of the few in the bills with high deaths from fever along with high deaths from choleraic disease; and that excess of fever mortality may have been due in part to the ague epidemic, then in its third season.

The following extracts from Short’s summation of parish registers show the great excess of burials over baptisms in various parts of England during the years of the aguish epidemic constitution.

Country Parishes.

Market Towns.

The Influenza of 1688.

The seasons continued, according to Sydenham, to produce epidemic agues until 1685, when the constitution radically changed to one of pestilential fevers, affecting many in all ranks of society and reaching a height in 1686. Sydenham records nothing beyond that date, having shortly after fallen into ill health and ceased to write or even to practise. One would wish to have known what he made of the “new distemper” in the summer of 1688, for it was a sudden universal fever, and yet not a catarrh or a “great cold.” It is thus referred to in a letter of the month of June, from Belvoir, Rutlandshire[601]: “The man that dos the picturs in inemaled is gon up to London for a weke.... I wish the man dos not get this new distemper and die before he comes agane.” On turning to the London weekly bills of mortality we find in the first weeks of June the characteristic rise of one of those sudden epidemic fevers or new diseases, of which the earliest with recorded figures was the “gentle correction” of July, 1580. The following are the weekly London figures corresponding to the “new distemper” of 1688:

Weekly London Mortalities.

1688

The contemporary London notice of this “influenza” comes from Dr Walter Harris, who mentioned it in a book written the year after[602]:

It will be seen, however, that the bills rose very considerably for four weeks, and that, too, in the healthiest season of the year.

A somewhat fuller account of its symptoms is given by Molyneux for Dublin[603]. He had been informed by a learned physician from London that it had been as general there as in Dublin, which we know to have been the case from Harris’s account. Both Molyneux and Harris call it a slight fever, without mentioning catarrhal symptoms. The spring months immediately preceding had been remarkable for drought.

This short fever of men was preceded by a slight but universal horse-cold[604].

The Influenza of 1693.

Molyneux considered the strange transient fever of the summer of 1688 to have been the most universal fever that perhaps had ever appeared, and he thought the universal catarrh of five years’ later date (1693) to have been “the most universal cold.” We have thus a means of contrasting in the descriptions of the same author a universal slight fever and a universal catarrh, which happened within five years of each other, and were neither of them called at the time by the name of influenza,—a name not known in Britain until half a century later. Before coming to Molyneux’s description, it should be said that the London bills of mortality bear no decided trace of an influenza in the end of the year 1693, the following being the highest weekly mortalities nearest to the date given for the epidemic at Dublin[605]:

London Weekly Mortalities.

1693

Molyneux’s account of the flying epidemic of 1693 is as follows[606]:

Yet no other writer, English or foreign, appears to have mentioned it. Its existence rests on the authority of Molyneux alone, according to the above very circumstantial narrative.

The Influenza of 1712.

There were so many fevers from 1693 to the end of the century that it is not easy to distinguish epidemic agues or catarrhs among them. If we follow the continental writers, it is not until 1709 and 1712 that there is any concurrence of testimony for such widespread maladies. Evelyn, however, says that in the remarkably dry and fine months of February and March, 1705, “agues and smallpox prevail much in every place” (21st February). The very general coughs and catarrhs of 1709 seem to have been really caused by the severity of the memorable hard winter, the frost having begun in October, 1708 and lasted until March, 1709. The evidences of a truly epidemic infectious catarrh or influenza all over Europe in 1709 are scanty and ambiguous. It is probably to this “universal cold” that Molyneux refers under the year 1708[607]; but English writers have not otherwise mentioned an epidemic in 1709.

The next, in 1712, was a “new ague” of the kind without catarrhal symptoms, like that of 1688. One German writer called it the “Galanterie-Krankheit,” another the “Mode-Krankheit,” and it was about the same time that the French name “la grippe” came into use. These names all mean “the disease a la mode” or the reigning fashion[608]; they remind one of the earlier “trousse galante” and “coqueluche” (a kind of bonnet), and of the “grande gorre” of 1494. It appears to have made little or no impression on the mortality, and would hardly have been noticed but for its wide prevalence. In England it was the subject of a brief essay by Dr John Turner under the title of “Febris Britannica Anni 1712[609]”—a certain epidemic fever, of the milder kind, fatal to none, but prevalent far and wide and leaving very few families untouched. It was marked by aching and heaviness of the head, burning or lancinating pains in the back, pains in the joints like those of rheumatism, loss of appetite, vomiting, pains of the stomach and intestines. The venom though not sharp, acted quickly. Turner ascribed it to malign vapours from the interior of the earth (malignos terrae matris halitus). Its season in England, as in Germany, was probably the summer or autumn. Turner begins his discourse with a reference to the plague in the East of Europe, which, he says, had been kept out of England by quarantine, to the murrain which was then raging in Italy (and appeared in England in 1714), and to fevers of a bad type which had traversed all France during the past spring, invading noble houses and even the royal palace. Having begun his discourse thus, he ends it by remarking that the slight British fever did not, in his opinion, forebode a plague to follow. It may have been a recurrence of this epidemic next year that Mead speaks of under the name of the “Dunkirk rant” (supposed to have been brought over from Dunkirk by returning troops after the Peace of Utrecht) in September, 1713; it was, he says, a mild fever, which began with pains in the head and went off easily in large sweats after a day’s confinement[610]. The weekly bills of mortality in London are no help to us to fix the date of the one or more slight fevers or influenzas about 1712-13. The great fever-years of the period were 1710 and 1714; but the fever was typhus, probably mixed with relapsing fever, according to the evidence in another chapter. Even compared with the universal fever or influenza of 1688, that of 1712 must have been unimportant; for the former sent up the London mortality considerably, whereas there is no characteristic rise to be found in any month of 1712 or 1713.

Either to this period, or to the undoubted aguish years 1727-28, belongs a curious statement as to “burning agues, fevers never before heard of to be universal and mortal,” in Scotland, the same having been a “sad stroke and great distress upon many families and persons.” The authority is Patrick Walker, who traces these hitherto unheard of troubles to the Union of the Crowns (1707)[611].

On other and perhaps better authority, it does appear that Scotland before that period was reputed to be remarkably free from agues; and it is probable that the universal and mortal burning agues some time between 1707 and 1728, had come in one of those strange epidemic visitations, just as the agues of 1780-84 did. It would be erroneous to conclude from such references to ague that Scotland had ever been a malarious country. Robert Boyle refers in two places to the rarity of agues in Scotland in the time of Charles II.; the Duke of York, he says[612], on his return out of Scotland, 1680, mentioned that agues were very unfrequent in that country, “which yet that year were very rife over almost all England”—to wit, the epidemic of 1678-80. Again, agues, especially quartans, are rare in many parts of Scotland, “insomuch that a learned physician answered me that in divers years practice he met not with above three or four[613].” However, Sir Robert Sibbald, while he admits the rarity of quartans, does allege that quotidians, tertians and the anomalous forms occurred, that agues might be epidemic in the spring, with different symptoms from year to year, and that certain malignant fevers, not called agues, were wont to rage in the autumn[614].

Epidemic Agues and Influenzas, 1727-29.

The contemporary annalist of epidemics in England is Wintringham, of York, who enters remittents and intermittents almost every year from 1717 to the end of his first series of annals in 1726; but none of his entries points very clearly to an epidemic of ague[615]. It is not until the very unwholesome years 1727-29 that we hear of intermittent fevers being prevalent everywhere, with one or more true influenzas or epidemic catarrhs interpolated among them. To show how unhealthy England was in general, I give a table compiled from Short’s abstracts of the parish registers, showing the proportion of parishes, urban and rural, with excess of burials over christenings:

Country Parishes.

Market Towns.

It is clear from the accounts by Huxham, Wintringham, Hillary, and Warren, of Bury St Edmunds[616], that much of the excessive sickness in 1727-29 was aguish, although much of it, and probably the most fatal part of it, was the low putrid fever so often mentioned after the first quarter of the 18th century. At Norwich, where the burials for three years, 1727-29, were nearly double the registered baptisms, many were carried off, says Blomefield, “by fevers and agues, and the contagion was general.” In Ireland also, a country rarely touched by true agues, Rutty enters intermittent fever as very frequent in May, 1728; and again, in the spring of 1729: “Intermittent fevers were epidemic in April; and some of the petechial kind. Nor was this altogether peculiar to us; for at that same time we were informed that intermittent and other fevers were frequent in the neighbourhood of Gloucester and London; and very mortal in the country places, but less in the cities.”

In the midst of this epidemic constitution of agues and other fevers there occurred one or more horse-colds, and one or more epidemic catarrhs of mankind. The most definitely marked or best recorded of these was the influenza of 1729.

The universal cold or catarrh of 1729 fell upon London in October and November, and upon York, Plymouth and Dublin about the same time. It prevailed in various parts of Europe until March, 1730, its incidence upon Italy being entirely after the New Year. The rise in the London deaths was characteristic: the level was high when the epidemic began, but the epidemic nearly doubled the already high mortality during the worst week and trebled the deaths from “fever.”

London Weekly Mortalities.

1729

The high mortalities of the weeks following may be taken as due to the sequelae of the epidemic (pneumonias, pleurisies, malignant fevers) and are indeed so explained in one contemporary account:

The influenza of October and November, 1729, was the occasion of a London essay[617], which appears to treat solely of the epidemic catarrh and its after-effects, and not of the two years’ previous sicknesses, which are the subject of another essay, by Strother, written before the influenza began. London, says this author, as well as Bath, and foreign parts, have been on a sudden seized universally with the disorders named in his title (fevers, coughs, asthmas, rheumatisms, defluxions etc.). These had come in the course of an unusually warm and wet, or relaxing, winter; “we have for some time past dwelt in fogs, our air has been hazy, our streets loaden with rain, and our bodies surrounded with water.” So many different symptoms attend the “New Disease” that a volume, he says, would not suffice to describe them, but he thus summarizes them:

He speaks of cases that had proved suddenly fatal and says that all who died of “epidemical catarrhs” had been found to have polypuses in their hearts. If reference be made to the Table, it will be seen that the high mortality continued in London for at least a month after the epidemic had passed through its ordinary course of rise, maximum and decline; and it is probably to that post-epidemic mortality that the author refers in the following passages:

Hillary’s account for Ripon is very brief[618]:

Wintringham, of York, says the epidemic in the early winter of 1729 was “a febricula with slight rigors, lassitude, almost incessant cough, pain in the head, hoarseness, difficulty in breathing, and attended with some deaths among feeble persons, from pleuritic and pulmonary affections[619].” There was a tradition at Exeter as late as 1775 that two thousand were seized in one night in the epidemic of 1729. Huxham, of Plymouth, says of the epidemic in November:

Rutty, of Dublin, merely says: “In November raged an universal epidemic catarrh, scarce sparing any one family. It visited London before us[620].”

These references to the unusual catarrhal febricula in November, 1729, are all that occur in the epidemiographic records kept by some four British writers who recorded the weather and prevalent diseases of those years. The epidemic catarrh made a slight impression upon them beside some other epidemics, and hardly a greater impression than another of the same kind, which seems to have occurred in the beginning of 1728. Thus, Rutty says, under November, 1727: “In Staffordshire and Shropshire their horses were suddenly seized with a cough and weakness. In December, it was in Dublin and remote parts of Ireland; some bled at the nose.” On December 25th, he enters: “The horses growing better, a cough and sore throat seized mankind in Dublin[621].” Huxham, for Devonshire, under Oct.-Nov. 1727 confirms this: “a vehement cough in horses, which lasted to the end of December; the greater number at length recovered from it.” He does not say in that context that an epidemic cough followed among men, as Rutty does say for Dublin; but in a subsequent note upon horse-colds, he says: “In 1728 and 1733 it [the precedence of the horse-cold] was most manifest; in which years a most severe cough seized almost all the horses, one or two months earlier than men.” From which it would appear that the influenza of Nov.-Dec. 1729, was not the only one during the aguish years 1727-29.

In the weekly London bills the other series of mortalities that look most like those of an influenza are in the month of February, 1728 (748, 889, 850 and 927 in four successive weeks, being more than double the average).

The Influenza of 1733.

The next influenza was three years after that of 1729—in January, 1733. In London, it raised the weekly deaths for a couple of weeks to a far greater height than the preceding had done. Also the purely catarrhal symptoms of running from the eyes and nose are more prominent in the accounts for 1733 than for the influenza of 1729. The first notice of it comes from Edinburgh. The horses having been “attacked with running of the nose and coughs towards the end of October and beginning of November,” the same symptoms began suddenly among men on the 17th December, 1732[622]. By the 25th the epidemic was general in Edinburgh, very few escaping, and it continued in that city until the middle of January, 1733. In a great many it began with a running of lymph at the eyes and nose, which continued for a day. Generally the patients were inclined to sweat, and some had profuse sweats. It was noted as remarkable that the prisoners in the gaol escaped; also the boys in Heriot’s Hospital, as well as the inhabitants of houses near to that charity. The Edinburgh deaths rose as in the following table; the bulk of these extra burials are said to have been at the public charges, the epidemic having swept away a great number of poor, old, and consumptive people:

Hillary[623] fixes the date of its beginning at Leeds on 3 February, one week later than at York, three weeks later than at Newcastle, or than in London and the south of England generally. At Leeds in three days’ time about one-third part of the people were seized with chills, catarrh, violent cough, sneezing and coryza; the epidemic lasted five or six weeks in the town and country near. Dr John Arbuthnot, who was then living in Dover Street, is clear that the outbreak in London was later than in Edinburgh, which indeed appears also from the paragraph in the Gentleman’s Magazine, dated Wednesday the 11th January, and from a comparison of the dates of highest mortalities in London (p. 349) and Edinburgh. It was in Saxony from the 15th November to the 29th of that month, and in Holland before it broke out in England. But it had begun in New England in the middle of October, and had broken out soon after in Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru. Its outbreak in Paris was at the beginning of February, 1733, and at Naples in March. The symptoms, says Arbuthnot, were uniform in every place—small rigors, pains in the back, a thin defluxion occasioning sneezing, a cough with expectoration. In France the fever ended after several days in miliary eruptions, in Holland often in imposthumations of the throat. In some, the cough outlasted the fever six weeks or two months. The horses were seized with the catarrh before mankind[624].