A generation of Fevers in Cork.
Rogers is clear that typhus fever was never extinct, while the three several times when it “made its appearance amongst us in a very signal manner,” are the same as its seasons in England, namely 1708-10, 1718-21 and 1728-30[428]. His experience relates only to the city of Cork, and, so far as his clinical histories go, only to the well-to-do classes therein; and although those seasons were years of scarcity and distress all over Ireland, yet Rogers does not seem to associate insufficient food with the fever, and never mentions scarcity. The fevers were in the winter, for the most part, and were usually accompanied by epidemic smallpox of a bad type, which in 1708 “swept away multitudes.” Nothing is said of dysentery for the earliest of the three fever-periods; but for 1718 and following years we read that “dysentery of a very malignant sort, frequently producing mortification in the bowels,” prevailed during the same space; and that the winters of the third fever-period, namely, those of 1728, 1729 and 1730 were “infamous for bloody fluxes of the worst kind.” It is clear that the fever spread to the richer classes in Cork, for his five clinical histories are all from those classes. The following is his general account of the symptoms:
The patient is suddenly seized with slight horrors or rather chilliness, to which succeed a glowing warmth, a weight and fixed pain in the head, just over the eyebrows; soreness all over his flesh, as if bruised, the limbs heavy, the heart oppressed, the breathing laboured, the pulse not much altered, but in some slower; the urine mostly crude, pale and limpid, at first, or even throughout, the tongue moist and not very white at first, afterwards drier, but rarely black. An universal petechial effloresence not unlike the measles paints the whole surface of the body, limbs, and sometimes the very face; in some few appear interspersed eruptions exactly like the pustulae miliares, filled with a limpid serum. The earlier these petechiae appear, the fresher in colour, and the longer they continue out, the better (p. 5). The fixed pain in the head increasing, ends commonly in a coma or stupor, or in a delirium with some. Some few have had haemorrhage at the nose, a severe cough, and sore throat. In some he had observed a great tendency to sweats, even from the beginning: these are colliquative and symptomatic, not to be encouraged. In but few there have appeared purple and livid spots, as in haemorrhagic smallpox: some as large as a vetch, others not bigger than a middling pin’s head, thick set all over the breast, back and sometimes the limbs, the pulse in these cases being much below normal. The extremities cold from the 6th or 7th day, delirium constant, tongue dry and black, urine limpid and crude, oppression greater, and difficulty of breathing more. It is a slow nervous fever (p. 18).
Rogers believed that mere atmospheric changes could not be the cause of these epidemics: “they may favour, encourage and propagate such diseases when once begun; but for the productive cause of them we must have recourse to such morbid effluvia as above described [particles of all kinds detached from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms]; or resolve all into the θεῖον τί so often appealed to by Hippocrates[429].”
But, as regards Cork itself, special interest attaches to the following “four concurring causes:”
“1st, the great quantities of filth, ordure and animal offals that crowd our streets, and particularly the close confined alleys and lanes, at the very season that our endemial epidemics rage amongst us.
2nd, the great number of slaughter-houses, both in the north and south suburbs, especially on the north ridge of hills, where are vast pits for containing the putrefying blood and ordure, which discharge by the declivities of those hills, upon great rains, their fetid contents into the river.
3rd, the unwholesome, foul, I had almost said corrupted water that great numbers of the inhabitants are necessitated to use during the dry months of the summer.
4th, the vast quantities of animal offals used by the meaner sort, during the slaughtering seasons: which occasion still more mischief by the quick and sudden transition from a diet of another kind.”
In farther explanation of the fourth concurring cause, he says that in no part of the earth is a greater quantity of flesh meat consumed than in Cork by all sorts of people during the slaughtering season—one of the chief industries of the place being the export of barrelled beef for the navy and mercantile marine. The meat, he says, is plentiful and cheap, and tempts the poorer sort “to riot in this luxurious diet,” the sudden change from a meagre diet, with the want of bread and of fermented liquors, being injurious to them[430].