The other essay was by one of the king’s physicians, Dr Tobias Whitaker, who had attended the Court in its exile at St Germain and the Hague. He was by no means an empiric, as some were whom Charles II. delighted to honour; and, although he protests warmly against the modish injudicious treatment of smallpox by blooding and cooling, he has little of the recriminating manner of the time, which Sydenham used from the one side and Morton from the other. He is, indeed, all for moderation: “upon this hinge of moderation turneth the safety of every person affected with this disease.” His moderation is somewhat like that of Sir Thomas Browne (whose colleague he may have been for a few years at Norwich), and is apt to run into paradox. In 1634 he wrote in praise of water, including the waters of spas and of the sea, and in 1638 he wrote with even greater enthusiasm in praise of wine[822]. He says of his “most learned predecessor” at Court, Harvey, that his demonstration of the circular motion of the blood was a farther extension of what none were ignorant of “though not expert in dissection of living bodies.” On his return to London in 1660, he seemed to find as great a change in smallpox as in the disposition of the people towards the monarchy. His statement as to the change for the worse that had come over smallpox within his memory would be of the highest historical importance if we could be sure it was not illusory; it is difficult to reconcile with the London experiences of smallpox in 1628 and 1641, but, such as it is, we must take note of it:

When Whitaker calls smallpox a “childish disease,” a disease that was “antiently and generally in the common place of petit and puerile, and the cure of no moment,” he says no more than Willis and others say of smallpox as it affected infants and children. Says Willis: “there is less danger if it should happen in the age of childhood or infancy”; and again: “the sooner that anyone hath this disease, the more secure they are, wherefore children most often escape”; and again: “the measles are so much akin to the smallpox that with most authors they have not deserved to be handled apart from them,” although he recognizes that measles is sooner ended and with less danger. Nor was Willis singular among seventeenth-century physicians in his view—“the sooner that anyone hath this disease the more secure they are.” Morton in two passages remarks upon the greater mildness of smallpox in “infants”: “For that they are less anxious about the result, infants feel its destructive force more rarely than others”; and again: “Hence doubtless infants, being of course ἀπαθεῖς, are afflicted more rarely than adults with the severe kinds of confluent and malignant smallpox[824].”

In the very first treatise written by an English physician specially on the Acute Diseases of Infants, the work by Dr Walter Harris, there is a statement concerning the mildness of “smallpox and measles in infants” (who are defined as under four years of age), which goes even farther than Morton’s:

It has to be said, however, that Morton’s statement about infants is made to illustrate a favourite notion of his that apprehension as to the result, which infants were not subject to, made smallpox worse; and that Harris’s assertion of the natural mildness of the “smallpox and measles” of infants comes in to illustrate the evil done by the heating regimen of physicians and nurses, who are mentioned in obviously sarcastic terms. So also Sydenham says that “many thousands” of infants had perished in the smallpox through the ill-timed endeavours of imprudent women to check the diarrhoea which was a complication of the malady, but was in Sydenham’s view, although not in Morton’s, at the same time a wholesome relieving incident therein. If we may take it that infants and young children had smallpox in a mild form, or more rarely confluent than in adults, we may also conclude that many of them died, whether from the alexipharmac remedies which Morton advised and Sydenham (with his follower Harris) denounced, or from the attendant diarrhoea which Sydenham thought a natural relief to the disease and Morton thought a dangerous complication.

Making every allowance for motive or recrimination in the statements, from their several points of view, by Willis, Sydenham, Morton, Harris (Martin Lister might have been added), as to the naturally mild course of smallpox in infants, or when not interfered with by erroneous treatment, it cannot but appear that infantile smallpox at that time was more like measles in its severity or fatality than the infantile smallpox of later times. It is perhaps of little moment that Jurin should have repeated in 1723 the statements of Willis and others (“the hazard of dying of smallpox increases after the birth, as the child advances in age”)[826], for he had little intimate knowledge of epidemics, being at that time mainly occupied with mathematics, and with smallpox from the arithmetical side only. But it is not so easy to understand why Heberden should have said the same a generation after[827]; or how much credit should attach to the remark of “an eminent physician from Ireland,” who wrote to Dr Andrew, of Exeter, in 1765: “Infants usually have the natural pock of as benign a kind as the artificial[828].”

Whatever may have been its fatality or severity among infants and children, it was chiefly as a disease of the higher ages that smallpox in the Stuart period attracted so much notice and excited so much alarm. The cases mentioned in letters and diaries are nearly all of adults; and these were the cases, whatever proportion they may have made of the smallpox at all ages, that gave the disease its ill repute. About the middle of the 18th century we begin to have exact figures of the ages at which deaths from smallpox occurred: the deaths are then nearly all of infants, so much so that in a total of 1622, made up from exact returns, only 7 were above the age of ten, and only 92 between five and ten; while an age-incidence nearly the same continued to be the rule until after the great epidemic of 1837-39, when it began gradually to move higher[829]. But we should err in imagining that state of things the rule for the 17th century, just as we should err in carrying it forward into our own time. Not only are we told that smallpox of infants was like measles in that the cure was of no moment (which is strange), but we do know from references to smallpox in the familiar writings of the Stuart period that many of its attacks, with a high ratio of fatalities, must have happened to adults. Thus, to take the diary of John Evelyn, he himself had smallpox abroad when he was a young man, his two daughters died of it in early womanhood within a few months of each other, and a suitor for the hand of one of them died of it about the same time. Medical writings leave the same impression of smallpox attacking many after the age of childhood. Willis gives four cases, all of adults. Morton gives sixty-six clinical cases of smallpox, the earliest record of the kind, and one that might pass as modern: twelve of the cases are under six years of age, nine are at ages from seven to twelve, eleven from thirteen years to twenty, seven from twenty-two to forty, and all but two of the remaining twenty-four clearly indicated in the text, in one way or another, as adolescents or adults, the result being that 23 cases are under twelve and 43 cases over twelve[830].

That ratio of adults to children may have been exceptional. Morton was less likely to be called to infants than to older persons, even among the middle class; and no physician in London at that time knew what was passing among the poorer classes, except from the bills of mortality. But if Morton had practised in London two or three generations later, say in the time of Lettsom, when “most born in London have smallpox before they are seven,” his casebook would not have shown a proportion of forty-three cases over twelve years to twenty-three under that age. Whatever things contributed to the growing evil repute of smallpox among epidemic maladies, there is so much concurrent testimony to the fact itself that we can hardly take it to have been wholly illusion. In some parts the mildness of smallpox was still asserted as if due to local advantages. Thus Dr Plot, who succeeded Willis in his chair of physics at Oxford, wrote in 1677: “Generally here they are so favourable and kind that, be the nurse but tolerably good, the patient seldom miscarries[831].”

The reason commonly assigned for the large number of fatalities in smallpox after the Restoration was erroneous treatment. That is the charge made, not only in the gossip of the town, as Pepys reported it, but in Sydenham’s animadversions on the heating regimen, in Morton’s on the cooling regimen, and in the sarcasms of both physicians upon the practice of “mulierculae” or nurses. One may easily make too much of this view of the matter; it is certain that the incidence of smallpox, its fatality and its frequency in general, were determined in the Stuart period, as at other times, by many things besides. Still, the treatment of smallpox has always had the first place in its epidemiological history. The fashion of it that concerns us at this stage was the famous cooling regimen, commonly joined with the name of Sydenham.

Sydenham’s Practice in Smallpox.

Sydenham occupied his pen largely with smallpox, and gained much of his reputation by his treatment of it. At the root of his practice lay the distinction that he made between discrete smallpox and confluent. His practice in the discrete form was to do little or nothing, leaving the disease to get well of itself. Whether the eventual eruption were to be discrete or confluent, he could not of course tell for certain until two or three days after the patient sickened; but in no case was the sick person to be confined to bed until the eruption came out. If the latter were sparse or discrete, the patient was to get up for several hours every day while the disease ran its course, the physician having small occasion to interfere with its progress: “whoever labours under the distinct kind hardly needs the aid of a physician, but gets well of himself and by the strength of nature.” One may see how salutary a piece of good sense this was at the time, by taking such a case as that of John Evelyn, narrated by himself[832]. He fell ill at Geneva in 1646, and was bled, leeched and purged before the diagnosis of smallpox was made. “God knows,” he says, “what this would have produced if the spots had not appeared.” When the eruption did appear, it was only the discrete smallpox; the pimples, he says, were not many. But he was kept warm in bed for sixteen days, during which he was infinitely afflicted with heat and noisomeness, although the appearance of the eruption had eased him of his pains. For five whole weeks did he keep his chamber in this comparatively slight ailment. When he suggested to the physician that the letting of blood had been uncalled for, the latter excused the depletion on the ground that the blood was so burnt and vicious that the disease would have turned to plague or spotted fever had he proceeded by any other method[833].

As there were many such cases, Sydenham’s radical distinction between discrete and confluent smallpox, with his advice to leave the former to itself, was of great value, and is justly reckoned to his credit. But in the management of confluent smallpox he advised active interference. If there were the slightest indication that the disease was to be confluent (that is to say, the eruption copious and the pocks tending to run together), he at once ordered the patient to receive a vomit and a purge, and then to be bled, with a view to check the ebullition of the blood and mitigate the violence of the disease. Even infants and young children were to have their blood drawn in such an event. This heroic treatment at the outset was according to the rule of obsta principiis; by means of it he thought to divert the attack into a milder course. The initial depletion once over, Sydenham had resort to what is known as the cooling regimen. He set his face against the “sixteen days warm in bed,” which Evelyn had to endure even in a discrete smallpox. It was usually a mistake for the patient to take to bed continually before the sixth day from his sickening or the fourth day from the appearance of the eruption; after that stage, when all the pustules would be out, the regimen would differ in different confluent cases, and, of course, in some a continuance in bed would be inevitable as well as prudent. In like manner cardiac or cordial remedies, which were of a heating character, were indicated only by the patient’s lowness. The more powerful diaphoretic treacles, such as mithridate, were always a mistake. The tenth day was a critical time, and then paregoric was almost a specific. In the stage of recovery it was not rarely prudent to prescribe cordial medicines and canary wine. Thus, on a fair review of Sydenham’s ordinances for smallpox in a variety of circumstances, it will appear that he did not carry the cooling regimen to fanatical lengths and that he was sufficiently aware of the risks attending a chill in the course of the disease[834].

Apart from his rule of leaving cases of discrete smallpox to recover of themselves, Sydenham’s management of the disease was neither approved generally at the time, nor endorsed by posterity. His phlebotomies in confluent cases, usually at the outset, but sometimes even after the eruption was out if the patient had been under the heating regimen before, were an innovation borrowed from the French Galenists. The earlier writers had, for the most part, excepted smallpox among the acute maladies in which blood was to be drawn. But the Galenic rules of treatment were made more rigorous in proportion as they were challenged by the Paracelsist or chemical physicians, and it was among the upholders of tradition that blood-letting was extended to smallpox. Whitaker says that, when he was at St Germain with the exiled Stuarts, the French king was blooded in smallpox ten or eleven times, and recovered; “and upon this example they will ground a precept for universal practice.”

The ill effects of blood-letting, says Whitaker, may be observed in French children, which by this frequent phlebotomizing are “withered in juvenile age.” Therefore, he concludes, blooding in smallpox should not be a common remedy, “but in such extremity as the person must lose some part of his substance to save the whole.” He calls it the rash and inconsiderate practice of modish persons; “and if the disease be conjunct [confluent], with an undeniable plethory of blood, which is the proper indication of phlebotomy, yet such bleeding ought to be by scarification [upon the arms, thighs or back] and cupping-glasses, without the cutting of any major vessel.” Another English physician of the time, Dr Slatholm, of Buntingford in Hertfordshire, who wrote in 1657[836], says that he had known physicians in Paris not to abstain from venesection in children of tender age, even in sucklings. He had never approved the letting of blood in such cases, lest nature be so weakened as to be unable to drive the peccant matter to the skin. For the most part, he says, an ill result follows venesection in smallpox; and although it sometimes succeeds, yet that is more by chance than by good management. As to exposing the sick in smallpox to cold air, he declares that he had known many in benign smallpox carried off thereby, instancing the case of his brother-in-law, the squire of Great Hornham, near Buntingford, whose death from smallpox in November, 1656, in the flower of his age, he set down to a chill brought on “ejus inobedientia et mulierum contumacia[837].”

The cooling regimen, as well as the danger of it, was familiar long before Sydenham’s time. There could be no better proof of this than a bit of dialogue in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Fair Maid of the Inn’ (Act II. scene 2), a comedy which was licensed in January, 1626:

Sydenham says that the heating regimen was the practice of empirics and sciolists. Per contra his distinguished colleague Morton says that every old woman and apothecary practised the cooling regimen, and he points the moral of its evil consequences in a good many of his sixty-six clinical cases[838]. He pronounces the results of the cooling regimen to have been disastrous; he had been told that Sydenham himself relaxed the rigour of his treatment in his later years. There was so little smallpox for some fifteen years after the date of Morton’s book (1694) that the controversies on its treatment appear to have dropped. But, on the revival of epidemics in 1710 and 1714, essays were written against blooding, vomits and purges in smallpox[839].

In 1718, Dr Woodward, the Gresham professor of physic and an eminent geologist, published some remarks on “the new practice of purging” in smallpox, which were directed against Mead and Freind. In 1719 Freind addressed a Latin letter to Mead on the subject (the purging was in the secondary fever of confluent smallpox), and a lively controversy arose in which Freind referred to Woodward anonymously as a well-known empiric. On the 10th of June, 1719, about eight in the evening, Woodward was entering the quadrangle of Gresham College when he was set upon by Mead. Woodward drew his sword and rested the point of it until Mead drew his, which he was long in doing. The passes then began and the combatants advanced step by step until they were in the middle of the quadrangle. Woodward declared (in a letter to the Weekly Journal) that he was getting the best of it, when his foot slipped and he fell. He found Mead quickly standing over him demanding that he should beg his life. This Woodward declined to do, and the combat degenerated to a strife of tongues[840]. Next year the controversy over the treatment of smallpox assumed a triangular form. The third side was represented by Dr Dover, who had been something of a buccaneer on the Spanish main and was now in practice as a physician. An old pupil of Sydenham’s, he still adhered to blood-letting in smallpox; and in the spring of 1720, when the disease was exceedingly prevalent among persons of quality in London, he claimed to have rescued from death a lady whom Mead had given over, by pulling off the latter’s blisters and ordering a pint of blood to be drawn. “He hath observed the same method with like success with several persons of quality this week, and is as yet in very great vogue.... He declaims against his brethren of the faculty [especially Mead and Freind], with public and great vehemence, and particularly against purging and blistering in the distemper, which he affirms to be the death of thousands[841].”

Huxham, another Sydenhamian, appears to have practised not only blooding in smallpox, but also blistering, purging and salivating[842]. But in that generation the practice was exceptional; so much so that when it revived in some hands about 1752 (including Fothergill’s), it was thus referred to in a letter upon the general epidemic of smallpox in that year: “I have heard that bleeding is more commonly practised by some of the best physicians nowadays than it was formerly, even after the smallpox is come out[843].” In smallpox the lancet, like other methods, has been in fashion for a time, and then out of fashion; but the old teaching that smallpox did not call for blood-letting was ultimately restored. When Barker, in 1747, gave a discourse before the College of Physicians on the “Agreement betwixt Ancient and Modern Physicians,” he did not venture to defend Sydenham’s blooding in smallpox, although he would not admit that he was “a bloodthirsty man[844].”

Causes of Mild or Severe Smallpox.

Besides the errors of the heating or the cooling regimen respectively, there is another thing that may have had something to do with the greater fatality of smallpox, as remarked by many, about the middle of the 17th century. “How is it,” asks Sydenham, “that so few of the common people die of this disease compared with the numbers that perish by it among the rich[845]?” Sydenham may not have known how much smallpox mortality there was in the poorer quarters of London. But the Restoration was certainly a great time of free living in the upper classes of society, and it is equally certain that smallpox was apt to prove a deadly disease to a broken constitution. Willis believed that excesses even predisposed people to take the infection: “I have known some to have fallen into this disease from a surfeit or immoderate exercise, when none besides in the whole country about hath been sick of it.” There were, of course, families in which smallpox was for some unknown reason peculiarly fatal. Again, the origins of constitutional weakness are lost in ancestry, the poor stamina of children being often determined by the lives of their grandfathers or great-grandfathers. In the royal family of Stuart smallpox proved more than ordinarily fatal, but it was among the grand-children and great grand-children of James I. that those fatalities happened. Of the children of Charles I., the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess of Orange died of smallpox within a few months of each other in the year of the Restoration. The disease was not less fatal a generation after in the family of the Duke of York (James II.). Dr Willis fell into disgrace with that prince because he bluntly told him that the ailment of one of his sons was “mala stamina vitae.” All his sons, says Burnet, died young and unhealthy, one of them by smallpox. Of his two daughters, Queen Mary died of haemorrhagic smallpox in 1694, and the Duke of Gloucester, only child of the other, Princess Anne of Denmark (afterwards Queen Anne), died at the age of eleven, of a malady which was called smallpox by some, and malignant sore-throat by others[846].

Among the medical writers of this period, who gave reasons why smallpox should be so severe or deadly in some while it was so slight in others, Morton was the most systematic. He made three degrees of smallpox—benign, medium and malignant: these did not answer quite to the discrete, confluent and haemorrhagic of other classifiers, for his malignant class included so many confluent cases that in one place he uses malignae as the equivalent of confluentes seu cohaerentes, while his middle class was made up of some confluent cases,—perhaps such medium cases as had confluent pocks on the face but not elsewhere,—and a certain proportion of discrete. The medium kind were the most common (frequentissimae sunt et maxime vulgares variolae mediae). Still, it was the benign type that he made the norma or standard of smallpox, from which the disease was “deflected” towards the medium type, or still farther deflected towards the malignant. He gives a list of fourteen things that may serve to deflect an attack of smallpox from the norma of mildness to the degrees of mean severity or malignity:

Morton having made the benign type the norm, made the medium type the commonest; and that was really true of the first great epidemic in London in his experience, in the years 1667-68. Sydenham says of it that the cases were more than he ever remembered to have seen, before or after: “nevertheless, as the disease was regular and of a mild type, it cut off comparatively few among the immense number of those who took it.” Pepys enters this epidemic under the date of 9 Feb. 1668: “It also hardly ever was remembered for such a season for the smallpox as these last two months have been, people being seen all up and down the streets newly come out after the smallpox.” Let us pause here for a moment to ask what Pepys may have meant by recognising the people all up and down the streets newly come out after the smallpox. Did he mean that they were pock-marked? We may answer the question by the testimony of Dr Fothergill for a correspondingly mild and extensive prevalence of smallpox in London some three generations later, which I shall take out of its order because it bears upon the question of pitting. His report for December 1751 is:[847]

This was an epidemic such as Sydenham alleges that of 1667-68 to have been; and the vestiges of smallpox by which Pepys recognized those who were newly come out of the disease were probably the same that Fothergill saw in 1752.

A practitioner at Chichester does indeed say as much of those treated by himself about the same date: “when the distemper did rage so much in and about Chichester, ten or a dozen years since [written in 1685], it was a great many that fell under my care, I believe sixty at the least, and yet I lost but one person of the disease. Nor was one of my patients marked with them to be seen but half a year after[848].” As these experiences must have been somewhat exceptional I shall give a section to the general case.

Pockmarked Faces in the 17th Century.

The smallpox of 1667-68 had among its numerous victims one of the king’s mistresses, the beautiful Frances Stewart, duchess of Richmond, residing in Somerset House, who caught the disease in March 1668 and was “mighty full of it.” Pepys, who records the fact, had seen her portrait taken shortly before: “It would make a man weep,” he exclaims, “to see what she was then and what she is likely to be by people’s discourse now.” Happily the worst fears were not realized. Pepys saw her driving in the Park in August, and remarks, without a strict regard to grammar, that she was “of a noble person as ever I did see, but her face worse than it was considerably by the smallpox.” The king, unlike the Lord Castlewood of romance, suffered no loss of ardour for his mistress, having visited her over the garden wall, as Mr Pepys relates, on the evening of Sunday, the 10th of May. It is rather the idea, and especially the historical idea, of these horrors that “would make a man weep,” and it has moved a great and eloquent historian of our own time to deep pathos[849]. If there be anything that can counteract the effects of agreeable rhetoric it is perhaps statistics. The following numerical estimate of the proportion of pockmarked faces in London after the Restoration is accordingly offered with all deference. It applies mainly to the criminal and lower classes, who were as likely as any to bear the marks of smallpox.

The result is that sixteen in the hundred are marked more or less with smallpox, four of them being black men or boys. One had “lately had the smallpox,” another had “newly recovered of the smallpox.” One was a cherry-cheeked boy of twelve, “somewhat disfigured with smallpox,” who had run away from Bradford school. Two are described as much disfigured, some as a little disfigured, several others as “full of pock-holes.” The same mark of identity is occasionally mentioned in the advertisements beyond the hundred tabulated, but not more frequently than before, the usual term in the later period being “pock-broken.” This proportion of pock-marked persons among the London populace, sixteen in the hundred, or about twelve in the hundred excluding negroes, does not err on the side of under-statement, if it errs at all. Some such small ratio is what we might have expected in the antecedent probabilities, arising out of the varying degrees of severity of smallpox and the various textures of the human skin. Pitting after smallpox has always been a special risk of a certain texture of the skin, namely, a sufficient thickness of the vascular layer to afford the pock a deep base. Such complexions are common enough even in our own latitudes; and those are the faces that have always borne the most obvious traces of smallpox. It was some of the confluent cases, or rather, of such of them as recovered, that became pock-marked: the babe that became a changeling was not likely to survive. Adults retained the marks more than children, so that there must always have been a good many pock-marked faces in a population where the incidence of the disease was largely upon grown persons, as in the 17th century and in our own time. When smallpox was something of a novelty at the end of the Elizabethan period, a poet addressed a pathetic lyric to his mistress’s pock-marked face. A medical writer of the same period reproduces the old Arabian prescription against pitting, to open the pocks on the face with a golden pin, and adds: “I have heard of some, which, having not used anythinge at all, but suffering them to drie up and fall of themselves, without picking or scratching, have done very well, and not any pits remained after it[850].” Whitaker, in 1661, dismisses the risk of pitting very briefly, remarking that the means of prevention was “commonly the complement of every experienced nurse[851].” Morton, in his sixty-six clinical cases and in his commentary, makes but slight reference to pitting. In his 14th case, a severe one, “no scars remained”; in his general remarks he treats pitting as a bugbear: “women set the fairness of their faces above life itself,” which may mean, as in Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedy, that they would chill themselves at all risks by the cooling regimen so they might drive the pocks in[852].

The Epidemiology continued to the end of the 17th century.

What little remains to be said of smallpox in England to the end of the seventeenth century may be introduced by the following table of the deaths in London.

Smallpox Deaths in London 1661 to 1700.

Sydenham’s remarks throw some light on the smallpox of the several years. While the epidemic of 1667-68 was of a regular and mild type, that of 1670-72, which has fewer deaths in the bills, was of the type of black smallpox complicated with flux. The year 1674 has the highest figures yet reached; the type of the disease was confluent, and so severe that it “almost equalled the plague”; while the smallpox of the year 1681, with a still higher total, was “confluent of the worst kind.”

It is not easy to make out what the differences of “type” described by Sydenham depended on; but it may be hazarded that those who fell into smallpox in an otherwise unhealthy season would die in larger numbers, being weakened by antecedent disease, such as measles or epidemic diarrhoea, influenza or typhus fever. An epidemic of measles in the first six months of 1674 was most probably the reason of the great fatality of smallpox in the second half of that year (see the chapter on Measles). The high figures of smallpox mortality in 1681 followed two hot summers, unhealthy with infantile diarrhoea, and coincided with a third season unhealthy in the same way. The deaths by smallpox in the last week of August, 1681, reached the very high figure of 168, the next highest cause of death that week, and the highest the week after, being “griping in the guts,” or infantile diarrhoea. The smallpox of 1685 was more uniformly distributed over the months of the year, which was one of malignant typhus, the worst week for fever having 114 deaths (ending 29 Sept.), and the worst week for smallpox 99 deaths (ending 18 Aug.).

The deaths by smallpox in the London bills are the only 17th century figures of the disease. According to later experience, a high mortality in London in a certain year meant an epidemic general in England in that or the following year; and the same appears to have held good for the period following the Restoration. In the parish register of Taunton, a weaving town, the smallpox deaths are many in 1658 (“all the year,” which was one of agues and influenza), in 1670, 1677, and 1684 (“very mortal,” the year being noted for a very hot summer and for fevers and dysenteries[853]). The highest total of deaths in London to the end of the 17th century fell in 1681, which is known to have been a year of very fatal smallpox at Norwich[854] and at Halifax. Thoresby’s friend Heywood lost three children by it at the latter town in the epidemic of 1681, which does not appear to have visited Leeds. In 1689 Thoresby himself lost his two children at Leeds within a few days. In 1699 the epidemic returned, and he again lost two of the four children that had been born to him in the interval[855]. Similar calamities befell country houses, of which the following from the correspondence of a titled family in Cumberland is an instance: