Circumstances of the great Epidemic in 1710.

For fifteen years after the year of Queen Mary’s death by haemorrhagic smallpox, there was comparatively little of the disease in London. In seven of the years the deaths were counted by hundreds, while the average of the whole period from 1695 to 1710, which included the years of Marlborough’s campaigns, was unaccountably low. There was a corresponding lull in the fever mortality in London; and as precisely the same kind of lull took place both in fever and smallpox during the next great war with France a century after, it may seem as if a state of war, instead of spreading infectious disease as it did in the countries where the war raged, had the effect in England of reducing it. The period of comparative immunity came to an end, both for fever and smallpox, with the great epidemic of each disease in 1710, in which year smallpox cut off 3138 in London and “great numbers in Norwich[864].” In 1714 there was another severe epidemic of smallpox in London, again in company with one of fever, and thereafter a high average for many years.

Smallpox deaths in London, 1701-1720.

Year Deaths from
smallpox		 Deaths from
all causes
1701 1099 20,471
1702 311 19,481
1703 398 20,720
1704 1501 22,684
1705 1095 22,097
1706 721 19,847
1707 1078 21,600
1708 1687 21,291
1709 1024 21,800
1710 3138 24,620
1711 915 19,833
1712 1943 21,198
1713 1614 21,057
1714 2810 26,589
1715 1057 22,232
1716 2427 24,436
1717 2211 23,446
1718 1884 26,523
1719 3229 28,347
1720 1442 25,454

The marked increase of smallpox deaths in 1710 and 1714, after an interval of low or moderate annual mortalities, caused the same cry to be raised as in the Restoration period, namely, that the medical treatment was to blame. Lynn, writing in 1714, says that many complaints were made of the destructiveness of smallpox in the epidemic four years before (1710), and of “the great want of better help, care or advice therein[865].” Woodward also ascribed the great increase of smallpox fatalities from 1710 onwards to erroneous treatment[866]. All the lives that might have been saved by better medical treatment or by more assiduous visiting of the sick would, in the then circumstances of the London populace, have made little difference to the bills of mortality. The causes that made fever so mortal in the same years were in great part the causes that made smallpox mortal, the former chiefly among those in the prime or maturity of life, the latter chiefly among the children. London had nearly reached its maximum of overcrowding; its population advanced but little for a good many years, and its mortality from all causes was so great that the numbers were only kept up by a constant recruit from the country. The necessity of doing something for the health of the poorer classes was felt, but nothing adequate was done or could be done[867]. So far as concerned the richer classes, they incurred constant danger of smallpox infection. In one of those fatal years, probably 1720, when there was smallpox among persons of quality in London, the Duchess of Argyll wrote to the Countess of Bute, to congratulate her on the birth of a daughter and on having two fine boys in her family already, “and he that has had the smallpox as good as two, so mortal as that distemper has been this year in town was never known[868].”

The domestics also of great houses frequently caught smallpox and spread it, a trouble which gave occasion at length, in 1746, to the first Smallpox Hospital for the admission of such of them as brought subscribers’ letters. Before that it had been the practice of the rich to send their domestics to private houses kept by nurses[869].

It was in these circumstances, and for the benefit of the upper classes and their domestics, that a project of getting through smallpox on easy terms was brought to the notice of London society in 1721.