A generation of Smallpox in Glasgow.

Glasgow had afforded the most striking instance in Britain of the decline of smallpox after the beginning of the 19th century. The decline was observed everywhere, but it was most noticeable in Glasgow, partly because the smallpox mortality of infants at the end of the 18th century had been excessive there, partly because Dr Watt took the trouble to prove it statistically from the burial registers. In the last six years of the 18th century, 1795-1800, smallpox had contributed 18·7 per cent. of the deaths from all causes; from 1801 to 1806, it contributed 8·9 per cent., and from 1807 to 1812 only 3·9 per cent. In the next six years, 1813-19, if Cleland’s search of the registers has been as laborious as Watt’s, the share of smallpox was only 1·07 per cent. of the deaths from all causes, which would mean that Glasgow was hardly at all touched by the epidemic of 1817-19, reported from many other parts of Scotland[1146]. But the lull in smallpox, which corresponded on the whole to the still greater lull in fevers during the prosperous times of the second half of the French war, was broken in Glasgow, if not in 1817, yet before long. Unfortunately there is a break in the statistics also. From 1821 the magistrates caused annual bills of mortality to be published, which did not, however, specify the causes of death until 1835[1147]. But we have some intermediate glimpses of the state of the poorer classes and of the prevalence of smallpox in particular. Writing in 1827, Dr Mac Farlane one of the poor’s surgeons, remarks upon the feeble stamina, sallow complexions, and the like, of all but a few children in the more crowded parts, adding that smallpox both in the virulent and “modified” forms had been more prevalent during the last three or four years than formerly[1148]. Three years after, Drs Andrew Buchanan and Weir gave an account of the state of the poor in Glasgow, which shows that it had actually deteriorated with the growth of the city. The poorer classes had been in some part displaced from their old dwellings in the heart of the town owing to the building of warehouses or the like, and had been provided with no new habitations as good as the old. “Apartments originally intended for cellars, and occupied as such until lately, are now inhabited by large families, and the only opening for light and air is the door, which when shut encloses the poor creatures in a tainted atmosphere and in total darkness. This is well exemplified in the cellars belonging to the houses on the south side of St Andrew’s Street.” Not only the notorious region of the Wynds, containing part of the three parishes of the Tron, St Enoch’s and St James’s, but also the Saltmarket and Gallowgate, were crowded with a destitute, vagrant and often vicious class of people. Many of the houses in the Wynds, with their network of alleys, were only one or two storeys high, in the old Scotch fashion; here were the night lodging-houses, with several beds in one room, two or three persons in a bed, twelve to eighteen people in as many square feet: “the extreme misery of these poor people is utterly inconceivable but to those who have actually witnessed it; it has certainly been carried to the very utmost point at which the existence of human beings is capable of being maintained. Some of them are lodged in places where no man of ordinary humanity would put a cow or a horse, and where those animals would not long remain with impunity.” Buchanan found sometimes a horse, sometimes an ass, sometimes pigs, in the same dungeon with one or more families[1149]. Such was the region in which Chalmers ministered from 1815 to 1822, first in the Tron parish, afterwards in the poor and crowded parish of St John’s. Things got no better, certainly, after he left worn out by his exertions, to become professor at St Andrews. Buchanan thought the best index of the degradation of the people in 1830 to be that not one in ten ever entered a church (if they had, he explains, the respectable congregation would have fled from their filth and rags). “The people are starving,” he exclaims, “and there is a law against the importation of food[1150].” It took sixteen years longer to secure the benefits of free trade, and meanwhile the public health of Glasgow got worse rather than better. The infantile part of it attracted far less notice than that which touched adults, so that we hear little of smallpox, while the records of fever and cholera are fairly complete. When the curtain is lifted in 1835 by the publication of statistics, the mortality of infants and children by infectious diseases is found to be proceeding as follows:

Glasgow Mortalities, 1835-39.

Year	Deaths from all causes	Deaths from smallpox	Deaths from measles	Deaths from scarlatina
1835	7198	473	426	273
1836	8441	577	518	355
1837	10270	351	350	79
1838	6932	388	405	87
1839	7525	406	783	262

According to the following table of the ages at death from smallpox, it will appear that a higher ratio of infants died of it in their first year at Glasgow than was the rule elsewhere, whether in the 18th or in the 19th century. It was only in the year 1837, when typhus was at its worst and smallpox had somewhat declined, that the deaths by the latter of infants under one year were fewer than those of infants in their second year:

Glasgow: Table of Deaths from Smallpox 1835 to 1839.

	Under 1	1-2	2-5	5-10	10-20	20-30	30-40	Above 40	Total
1835	204	154	75	17	14	8	1	0	473
1836	202	174	144	23	6	24	2	2	577
1837	93	116	94	24	10	11	4	0	352
1838	111	99	119	28	11	14	4	2	388
1839	137	98	113	19	15	17	5	2	406
Totals of five years	747	641	545	111	56	74	16	6	2196
Percentages	34%	29%	25%	5%	7%

Cowan, who published these figures in 1840, had written eight years before, “I fear that if the list of infantile diseases were still published in the mortality bills many deaths from smallpox would annually be found.” We do, indeed, hear of epidemics of smallpox not far from Glasgow. At Stranraer, in Sept.-Nov. 1829, “measles and smallpox attacked with scarcely an exception” all the children in the place who had not acquired immunity either by previous attacks or by the influence of vaccination; “and even these powerful protectives were, in many instances, of no avail.” The subjects of “unmodified” smallpox were nearly all infants of the poorer class. In St John’s Street, occupied by decent Scots labouring people, ten children had “unmodified” smallpox and all recovered; in Little Dublin Street, so called from its Irish tenants, fourteen children had smallpox, of whom six died[1151]. At Ayr, about the same time, there was an epidemic, which came to a height in 1830, causing a considerable mortality[1152]. At Edinburgh in the winter of 1830-31, it was unusually prevalent and fatal, the epidemic dying out in May, 1831[1153].

For three or four years, 1843-46, there was another lull in the prevalence of smallpox in Glasgow; but the mortality rose again, reaching in the two years 1851 and 1852 the total of 1202, in a population of 360,138, which contrasted with the 2212 deaths in London in the same two years, and with the Paris mortality of 706 in the two years 1850 and 1851, in a population of about one million, the deaths being still almost wholly infantile in Glasgow while they were in great part of adults in Paris[1154].

Glasgow Smallpox.

Year		Smallpox deaths
1840		455
1841 (pop. 282,134)		347
1842		334
1843		151
1844		99
1845		195
1846		not recorded
1847		592
1848		300
1849		366
1850		456
1851 (pop. 360,138)		618
1852		584

Registration of the causes of death began in Scotland in 1855. In the first decennial period, to 1864, the smallpox deaths were 10,548, falling upon infancy and other age-periods as in the following table[1155]:

Age-periods		Smallpox deaths
Under three months		774
Three to six months		668
Six to twelve months		1543
One to two years		1765
Two to three years		1132
Three to four years		798
Four to five years		514
Total under five years		7194
Above five years		3354
		10,548