The Cholera of 1832 in Scotland.
It was not until April that the infection began to show itself on the same scale in other parts of England. The next parts of the kingdom to be invaded after the Wear and the Tyne were the coal and iron districts of East Lothian and Lanarkshire, the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow becoming infected soon after. A fatal case, in a destitute tramping sailor occurred at Doncaster, in the beginning of January, but led to no outbreak; two fatal cases occurred at Morpeth about the same time, the second of the two in a bagman who had just spent three days making his rounds in Newcastle and the infected villages near it. It was on the high road to Edinburgh, at Haddington, Tranent and Musselburgh, that the next focus of cholera was established. Previous to the 14th of January there had been 47 cases, with 18 deaths, in and near Haddington, among the miners and others of the labouring class. At Tranent, seven miles nearer Edinburgh on the main road, with a population of 1700 miners and labourers, a boy died of cholera on the 18th January, the infection spreading so rapidly that before the 25th there had been 61 attacks with 26 deaths, which rose to 205 attacks and 60 deaths by the 8th of February. A few cases occurred also at North Berwick and a good many at Preston Pans; while Musselburgh became the scene of one of the most deadly outbreaks in the whole history.
Musselburgh, with Fisherrow, was not then the place of villas which it afterwards became, but was occupied by a working class, who combined the three industries of coal-mining, weaving or other factory work, and fishing. To add to the ordinary insanitary risks of such a combination, some fifteen hundred hands had been out of work for two months, and were in “a state of great misery.” The first case of cholera appeared there on Wednesday, the 18th January, three days after the first death at Tranent. The virulence and certainty of the infection will appear from the following by D. M. Moir, the distinguished author of Mansie Waugh and other writings in prose or verse, who practised his profession at Musselburgh:
“A girl at Musselburgh, whose mother kept a lodging-house, was found in a state of complete collapse on the morning of Thursday, the 19th January—the day after the first appearance of the pestilence. She died on that afternoon, between five and six, and was buried by moonlight the same evening.... The mother during the night of Saturday was also similarly seized, and fell a victim on the following noon. Her sister, who had walked from Leith on the same morning to condole with her in her family distress, was immediately affected on entering the house; but her symptoms being overlooked in the misery around her, medical assistance was not called in, until, on the return of the nieces from the interment, their aunt was discovered dead on the floor of the dwelling. Her husband, Baxter, a man of intemperate habits, came out to enquire into her fate; and immediately on his return home to Leith was seized with the distemper and died.”
In three weeks there were more deaths from cholera than from all causes in the whole of an ordinary year. To the 22nd of February, just over a month from its outbreak, the disease had attacked 435, of whom 193 died. The medical profession (the senior of whom was a man of original talent, Thomas Brown, author of an essay on smallpox, in 1808, and one on the Indian cholera in 1824), were greatly taxed by the numerous calls upon them: Moir met one night a young colleague who complained of feeling ill, and was advised by the former to go home at once; he continued his rounds for an hour longer, and died of cholera next morning. Edinburgh, only five miles distant, was in constant communication with Musselburgh; and at length three or four cases appeared in the city in persons who had been at the infected place. The Edinburgh cases, however, did not multiply rapidly; to the 8th of February, there had been 8 cases with four deaths; to the 28th of February, 35 cases, with 18 deaths; to the 20th of March, 39 cases, with 20 deaths. On the other hand, the suburb of Water of Leith, had 48 cases, with 23 deaths at the same date. On the 6th April, 1832, the figures for Edinburgh and certain of its suburbs respectively were:
| Cases | Deaths | |||
| Portobello | 44 | 24 | ||
| Water of Leith | 58 | 30 | ||
| Canonmills | 18 | 12 | ||
| Duddingston | 10 | 3 | ||
| Edinburgh | 62 | 38 |
Of the border towns, Hawick was infected on the 14th January, probably from Morpeth, and had a not very extensive epidemic, of somewhat mild type[1495]. Coldstream, on the Tweed, a few miles above Berwick, had 109 cases and 37 deaths to the 20th of March.
Meanwhile the infection had sought out the weak spots in the west of Scotland—the mining and weaving villages in Lanarkshire, the city of Glasgow and the manufacturing town of Paisley. On Sunday, the 22nd January, a boy was taken ill in church at Kirkintilloch (a village on the Forth and Clyde canal, seven miles north-east of Glasgow), and died next morning: that was the first case in the west of Scotland. Cases multiplied in Kirkintilloch, so that by the 6th of March there had been thirty-two deaths, but no more for the rest of the season. A few days after the boy was seized in church there, a first case occurred in the mining village of Coatbridge, six or seven miles to the south-east, in an old man living in a “back land” in very poor circumstances, who had not been in Kirkintilloch nor had communication with such as had been there; other cases followed slowly, and at length there was a more severe outbreak.
Glasgow at once took precautions. A Board of Health had been formed there early in the summer of 1831. In February, it had command of £8000 raised by voluntary subscriptions, and it made provision of 236 cholera beds in five hospitals. The theatres were closed, and “evening sermons” discouraged; while all the passenger boats (for a time also the goods barges) on the Forth and Clyde canal, and on the Monkland canal (near to which was Coatbridge) were stopped. District committees were formed in all parts of the city.
The first victim was Janet Lindsay, a drunken old woman who lodged with widow Proudfoot and her daughter in Todd’s Close, Goosedubs; she was asthmatic, and had not been beyond the Goosedubs for weeks. Her seizure, with vomiting and purging, was on the afternoon of Thursday, 9th February, and her death on Saturday morning. Also on the 9th February, in the suburb of Woodside, remote from Goosedubs, the infant of one McGie was attacked with cholera, suffered much from cramps on the 10th and died on the 11th, the father, mother and others of the family afterwards suffering from cholera. The third case, fatal in a few hours, appeared early in the morning of Friday the 10th in a boy living in Millroad Street, a mile east of the Goosedubs, who had been subject to diarrhoea for some weeks. The fourth victim was a gardener in Macalpine Street, a locality also remote from the Goosedubs and in the opposite direction from Millroad Street, who had walked three miles to Pollokshaws on the 9th, and had partaken of tea with friends at Crossmyloof on his way back, in excellent health: he was seized at midnight with purging, and died on the afternoon of the second day. The fifth case was in Partick on the 11th, the sixth in Bridgegate on the 12th, not far from the close in the Goosedubs where the first case had occurred. On the 17th the first of many cases occurred in Paisley, and on the same day there was a case at Maryhill (population of some 500), followed by six more before the next afternoon. Thus there were, besides the case of cholera in the very heart of old Glasgow, half-a-dozen other cases the same day or in the next day or two, at scattered points all round the city. About fifty of the neighbours had visited Janet Lindsay in Todd’s Close, and some had helped to lay her out. The next case in the close was of a woman who had stopped in the street to talk with the widow Proudfoot shortly after the body had been removed; this woman was seized at seven next morning (Sunday, the 12th Feb.), and died in the hospital after twenty-four hours. Three days passed, and then there occurred two other cases, both fatal, in Todd’s Close, one of them being the widow Proudfoot herself, who refused to be taken to the hospital, and would receive no other medicine or cordial but whisky. No other cases occurred in the close for several weeks; but within a range of two hundred yards of it there were 46 cases from the 13th to the 29th of February. It was, indeed to this region of Glasgow, the Goosedubs and the Wynds, that the infection was chiefly confined for the first few weeks; it was especially severe in Francis’s Close, Broomielaw, a collection of small wretched hovels, in which some twenty died of cholera[1496]. The state of the three old Wynds of Glasgow and of other the like localities has been already referred to under a date a year or two before the outbreak of cholera (supra p. 598).
No better instance could be given of the inscrutable ways in which the infection of cholera found out the weak places and the likely subjects than the explosion in the Glasgow Town’s Hospital or pauper infirmary on the 22nd of February, some twelve days after the first cases in various parts of the city and suburbs.
The infirmary, built in two blocks on the north bank of the Clyde, contained 395 inmates occupying 296 beds, some 60 or 70 of whom were insane or fatuous. The fatuous lived in ground-floor cells of the north block, from seven to eleven feet square, with a stone vaulted roof, a stone floor, no fireplace, damp from situation and want of sun, but all the more damp from being often washed owing to the uncleanly habits of the inmates. At eight on the morning of the 22nd February two fatuous paupers in adjoining cells were found cold and pulseless; they had vomited and purged during the night, although they had been well the evening before; each of the two cells had three beds with five occupants. One of the two seized died next day, the other recovered in a week, having had severe spasms and a degree of collapse. Cases appeared almost at the same time in various parts of the building, most of them in scattered individuals, but in one instance in as many as five together in a garret holding twenty-two. From the 22nd February to the 9th of March there were 64 attacks of cholera in this pauper institution[1497]. Besides the five deaths in the Sunderland Workhouse, this was the first of many instances of the remarkable invasion of such institutions.
Until July the infection had been limited in Glasgow to certain of the lowest localities, and even in these it had declined almost to extinction in the last week of May. As the summer advanced it increased somewhat again, and in the first days of August it took a sudden start, reaching a maximum of 181 attacks in one day, and 817 in a week. It was no longer confined to the poorest districts, but became diffused all over Glasgow, so that “there was scarcely a street where one or more cases did not occur.” From this enormous prevalence in August, it declined again in September, but once more took a start in the last few days of that month and in the first week or two of October. The last outburst was ascribed to the effects of the Glasgow public holiday on 28 September, to celebrate the passing of the Reform Bill for Scotland, but the course of the epidemic clearly followed the season, being precisely parallel in Edinburgh, in Dumfries and in the coast towns of Fife. From the middle of October, the disease declined rapidly and was extinct before the middle of November. The following table shows week by week the number of new cases reported daily to the Board of Health, and the deaths in each week[1498].
Cholera in Glasgow, 1832 (population 202,426).
| Week ending | New cases | Deaths | |||
| Feb. | 19 | 62 | 21 | ||
| 26 | 113 | 46 | |||
| Mar. | 4 | 68 | 39 | ||
| 11 | 85 | 60 | |||
| 18 | 94 | 50 | |||
| 25 | 150 | 61 | |||
| April | 1 | 138 | 74 | ||
| 8 | 112 | 57 | |||
| 15 | 99 | 50 | |||
| 22 | 120 | 60 | |||
| 29 | 71 | 40 | |||
| May | 6 | 71 | 39 | ||
| 13 | 73 | 39 | |||
| 20 | 41 | 31 | |||
| 27 | 21 | 11 | |||
| June | 3 | 6 | 7 | ||
| 10 | 45 | 17 | |||
| 17 | 72 | 39 | |||
| 24 | 168 | 70 | |||
| July | 1 | 127 | 72 | ||
| 8 | 131 | 62 | |||
| 15 | 143 | 68 | |||
| 22 | 229 | 101 | |||
| 29 | 218 | 113 | |||
| Aug. | 5 | 817 | 356 | ||
| 12 | 699 | 339 | |||
| 19 | 483 | 228 | |||
| 26 | 419 | 178 | |||
| Sept. | 2 | 231 | 122 | ||
| 9 | 117 | 50 | |||
| 16 | 60 | 31 | |||
| 23 | 84 | 33 | |||
| 30 | 165 | 90 | |||
| Oct. | 7 | 310 | 140 | ||
| 14 | 173 | 95 | |||
| 21 | 95 | 58 | |||
| 28 | 47 | 29 | |||
| Nov. | 4 | 41 | 18 | ||
| 11 | 10 | 11 | |||
| Total | 6208 | 3005 | |||
The effect of the epidemic upon the general mortality of Glasgow is shown in the table of deaths from all causes and from cholera month by month, compiled from the burial registers, which make the cholera deaths 161 more than the returns to the Board of Health.
Glasgow Mortality in 1832.
| All deaths | Cholera deaths | |||
| Jan. | 824 | — | ||
| Feb. | 874 | 87 | ||
| March | 955 | 264 | ||
| April | 816 | 229 | ||
| May | 677 | 125 | ||
| June | 783 | 196 | ||
| July | 990 | 441 | ||
| Aug. | 1755 | 1222 | ||
| Sept. | 749 | 243 | ||
| Oct. | 755 | 334 | ||
| Nov. | 529 | 25 | ||
| Dec. | 571 | — | ||
| 10,278 | 3166 | |||
While the cholera lasted (12 Feb.-11 Nov.) the burials from all other or ordinary causes were 4958; in the corresponding nine months of 1831 they were 4862, having been excessive in that year owing to fever. The baptisms from 15 December, 1831, to 14 December, 1832, were 3388; so that the cholera alone destroyed nearly as many lives, chiefly adult, as there were children born in the year.
Upwards of a thousand of the cases were treated at the Albion Street Hospital, under the direction of Dr Lawrie, who had had a large experience of cholera in India. His statistics are as follows[1499]:
Albion Street Cholera Hospital, Glasgow, Feb.-Sept. 1832.
| Males | Females | Both sexes | Percentages of deaths | |||||||||
| Cases | Deaths | Cases | Deaths | Cases | Deaths | |||||||
| 370 | 251 | 662 | 419 | 1032 | 670 | 64·9 | ||||||
| Ages | Cases | Deaths | Percentages of deaths | |||
| 0-7 | 43 | 25 | 58·1 | |||
| 7-20 | 93 | 47 | 50·5 | |||
| 20-30 | 231 | 112 | 48·8 | |||
| 30-40 | 211 | 137 | 64·9 | |||
| 40-50 | 204 | 136 | 66·1 | |||
| 50-60 | 116 | 95 | 81·0 | |||
| Over 60 | 134 | 120 | 89·5 |
Monthly Cases and Deaths.
| Cases | Deaths | Percentages of deaths | ||||
| Feb. | 40 | 33 | 82·5 | |||
| March | 97 | 69 | 71·1 | |||
| April | 122 | 81 | 66·3 | |||
| May | 56 | 40 | 71·4 | |||
| June | 126 | 94 | 74·5 | |||
| July | 240 | 143 | 59·5 | |||
| Aug. | 273 | 176 | 64·4 | |||
| Sept. | 64 | 33 | 51·5 |
The noteworthy points are: first, the great excess of women admitted, which was observed also at Edinburgh; secondly, the higher rate of fatality at the two extremes of life, which is the rule in some other infections; and thirdly, the lower ratio of deaths to cases during the height of the epidemic in the end of summer, which is explained, as Craigie remarked for Edinburgh, simply by the fact that the infection was no longer in the worst localities, but was attacking “a greater number of persons, and consequently much better constitutions.”
The Glasgow cholera of 1832 was far more destructive than that of Edinburgh per head of the population, according to the following:
| Glasgow | Edinburgh | |||
| Population | 202,426 | 136,301 | ||
| Attacks of Cholera | 6208 | 1886 | ||
| Deaths by Cholera | 3005 | 1065 |
The fluctuations of the epidemic in the two cities were closely parallel. In Edinburgh from the middle of February to the middle of June the new cases usually ranged from five to ten or fifteen a day, with an occasional excess, as on the 29th of April when there were twenty-six persons seized. As in Glasgow, there was a marked lull in the end of May and beginning of June, after which the seizures became more common and remained somewhat steady to the end of July, some days having as many as twenty attacks. The largest number in one day in August was nineteen, the September maximum sixteen (on the 28th). Edinburgh thus missed the enormous outburst that Glasgow had in August, while the September experiences were much the same in the two cities. The first week of October, which was the time of a second maximum in Glasgow (far below that of August), was the worst time of the whole epidemic in Edinburgh, the cases coming from all parts of the city, as in Glasgow they had done in August.
Successive days of most extensive Cholera in Edinburgh, 1832.
| New cases | |||
| Oct. | 1 | 22 | |
| 2 | 23 | ||
| 3 | 44 | ||
| 4 | 45 | ||
| 5 | 23 | ||
| 6 | 30 | ||
| 7 | 27 | ||
| 8 | 18 | ||
| 9 | 13 | ||
| 10 | 26 | ||
This gives 214 cases in the week ending 7th October, as compared with Glasgow’s 310 in the same week.
At the Castle Hill Cholera Hospital, 318 were admitted and 187 died. The ages, with the rates of fatality at each age-period, agree closely with those already given for the chief hospital in Glasgow. The smaller ratio of hospital fatality in the second half of the epidemic was perhaps more marked in Edinburgh: 119 cases, with 85 deaths, from the opening of the hospital to 5 July; 199 cases, with 97 deaths, from 5 July to the closing of the hospital. That larger proportion of recoveries may have been due in part, Craigie thinks, to better methods of treatment; but, in his opinion, it was mainly owing to the greater number of strong constitutions among those attacked over a wider area of the city.
Beyond the statistics and other particulars for Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the minute accounts of the first outbreaks in the beginning of the year, there is little exactly recorded of the cholera of 1832 in the rest of Scotland; but the following table, compiled according to counties from the alphabetical list of the London Board of Health, will serve to show the epidemic in outline.
Deaths by Asiatic Cholera in Scotland, 1832.
| Counties | Deaths | No. of places attacked | Places with highest mortalities in each county | |||
| Caithness | 96 | iii | Wick 69, Thurso 26, Latheron 1 | |||
| Sutherland | — | — | ||||
| Ross and Cromarty | 102 | vii | Tain 55, Dingwall 17, Avoch 12, Cromarty 11, Several villages no return | |||
| Inverness-shire | 191 | iii | Inverness 177 | |||
| Nairnshire | 5 | i | Nairn 5 | |||
| Moray | — | — | ||||
| Banffshire | 15 | i | Rathven (Buckie) 15 | |||
| Aberdeenshire | 108 | ii | Aberdeen and Footdee 99, Collieston 9 | |||
| Kincardine | — | — | ||||
| Forfarshire | 552 | iv | Dundee 512, Cupar Angus 17, Arbroath 13, Liff and Benvie 10 | |||
| Perthshire | 81 | v | Perth 66, Auchterarder 7, Kenmore 4, Tulliallan 3 | |||
| Fife and Kinross | 301 | xii | Cupar and district 108, Kirkaldy and Dunnikier 104, Dysart 39, Wester Wemyss 17, Kinghorn 15, Burntisland 13, Anstruther 10, Leven 14, St Andrews 5 | |||
| East Lothian | 213 | vii | Tranent 78, Haddington 65, Dunbar etc. 38, Prestonpans 28 | |||
| Berwickshire | 41 | Coldstream 41 | ||||
| Midlothian | 1780 | xiii | Edinburgh 1065, Suburbs of, 146, Leith 267, Musselburgh and Fisherrow 202, Newhaven 52, Portobello 33 | |||
| Linlithgowshire | — | — | ||||
| Clackmannanshire | 75 | i | Clackmannan 75 | |||
| Stirlingshire | 247 | x | Alloa 72, Stirling 35, Falkirk 36, Larbert 31, Balfron 28, St Ninian’s 15, Bothkenner 10, Carriden 13, Grangemouth 8 | |||
| Lanarkshire | 3575 | xii | Glasgow 3005, Pollokshaws 143, Govan 77, Old Monkland 125, Rutherglen 65 | |||
| Renfrewshire | 1001 | xi | Paisley 444, Greenock 436, Port Glasgow 69 | |||
| Dumbartonshire | 86 | iii | Dumbarton 67, Bonhill 13, Helensburgh 6 | |||
| Bute | 14 | i | Rothesay 14 | |||
| Argyle | 35 | ii | Inverary 25, Campbelltown 10 | |||
| Ayrshire | 466 | x | Kilmarnock 205, Ayr 190, Dairy 22, Irvine 19 | |||
| Kirkcudbrightshire | 133 | iv | Troqueer (Maxwelltown) 125, Kirkcudbright 3 | |||
| Dumfriesshire | 441 | v | Dumfries 418, Caerlaverock 15 | |||
| Roxburghshire | 34 | i | Hawick 34 (second outbreak only). |
Near Glasgow numerous centres of cholera were established, among which Paisley, Greenock and Dumbarton suffered heavily during the same space as Glasgow, from February to November. Rothesay, Campbelltown and Inverary had epidemics in spring or early summer. In June and July the infection was carried effectually into Ayrshire (an earlier importation to Doura, near Kilwinning, in March, having proved abortive) and caused great mortalities at Kilmarnock[1500] and Ayr[1501], as well as much alarm and a good many deaths at Dalry, Irvine and Loudoun. In the latter half of September a most disastrous outbreak began in Dumfries and in the neighbouring Maxwelltown[1502].
The epidemic in Leith and Newhaven proceeded at the same time as in Edinburgh. Another important centre was the midland coal-field of Stirlingshire and Lanarkshire, where the mortality was mostly autumnal. Perth had been reached early in March, Dundee at the end of April, the latter having a visitation on the same scale as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley and Greenock. From Dundee, Cupar Fife was infected about the middle of August, and had a severe epidemic almost confined to paupers[1503]. In the autumn there was much cholera among the fishing population from Thurso to Dunbar and Berwick. Inverness had been infected early in May, and was probably the centre from which the disease spread in the end of summer, during the herring fishery, to the coast towns and fishing villages, as well as to Tain and Dingwall. Only a few of these places made returns to the Board of Health; but it is probable from what Hugh Miller relates of the villages near Cromarty that the disease had been more widely spread. That author has described the condition of things in his native town. Its landlocked bay had been made a quarantine station, and was full of shipping flying the yellow flag. Cholera had “more than decimated” the villages of Portmahomak and Inver, and was prevalent in the parishes of Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall and Rosemarkie. The numerous dead at Inver were buried in the sand, infected cottages had been burned down, the infected hamlets of Hilton and Balintore had been shut off from the neighbouring country by a cordon[1504]. The citizens of Cromarty, hitherto untouched, followed the advice of Miller at a public meeting and took the law into their own hands, guarding all the approaches to their peninsula and subjecting all arrivals to fumigation with sulphur and to some undescribed application of chloride of lime. The infection, however, got in by an unguarded channel. A Cromarty fisherman had died of cholera at Wick; his clothes had been ordered to be burned, but a brother of the dead man, who was in Wick at the time, secured some of them and brought them home. He kept them in his chest for a month before he ventured to open it. Next day he was seized with cholera and died in two days. Thereafter the disease crept about the streets and lanes for weeks, striking down both the hale and the worn-out. Pitch and tar were kept burning during the night at the openings of the infected lanes; the clothes of the dead were burned; many of the fishers left their cottages and lived in the caves on the hill until the danger was past[1505].
Among the numerous fishing villages of the Moray Firth, Buckie is the only one given as severely touched by the infection (fifteen deaths). Only one small village of the Aberdeenshire coast, Collieston, is known to have had cholera (nine deaths)[1506]. The Aberdeen epidemic was not severe, and appears to have been mostly in the fishers’ quarter. The Montrose district escaped altogether in 1832; but in June, 1833, the true Asiatic cholera broke out in the fishing villages of Ferryden and Boddin, on the opposite shore of the South Esk from Montrose. Arbroath had a few deaths in August, 1832, while several of the small towns on the coast of Fife had from that time to the end of the year visitations which were only less alarming than those on the south side of the Firth of Forth at the beginning of the year. To sum up the epidemic in Scotland, it caused nearly ten thousand deaths, of which Glasgow and its suburbs had about one-third, Edinburgh, Leith, Dundee, Greenock, Paisley and Dumfries, another third, while a large part of the remainder occurred among the mining and fishing populations[1507].