The epidemic fever of 1741-42.
The harvest of 1739 had been an abundant one, and the export of grain had been large. At Lady-day the price of wheat had been 31s. 6d. per quarter, and it rose 10s. before Lady-day, 1740. An extremely severe winter had intervened, one of the three memorable winters of the 18th century. The autumn-sown wheat was destroyed by the prolonged and intense frost, and the price at Michaelmas, 1740, rose to 56s. per quarter, the exportation being at the same time prohibited, but not until every available bushel had been sold to the foreigners. The long cold of the winter of 1739-40 had produced much distress and want in London, Norwich, Edinburgh and other towns. In London the mortality for 1740 rose to a very high figure, 30,811, of which 4003 deaths were from fever and 2725 from smallpox. In mid-winter, 1739-40, coals rose to £3. 10s. per chaldron, owing to the navigation of the Thames being closed by ice; the streets were impassable by snow, there was a “frost-fair” on the Thames, and in other respects a repetition of the events preceding the London typhus of 1685-86. The Gentleman’s Magazine of January, 1740, tells in verse how the poor were “unable to sustain oppressive want and hunger’s urgent pain,” and reproaches the rich,—“colder their hearts than snow, and harder than the frost”; while in its prose columns it announces that “the hearts of the rich have been opened in consideration of the hard fate of the poor[129].” The long, hard winter was followed by the dry spring and hot summer of 1740, during which the sickness (in Ireland at least) was of the dysenteric type. In the autumn of 1740 the epidemic is said to have taken origin both at Plymouth and Bristol from ships arriving with infection among the men—at the former port the king’s ships ‘Panther’ and ‘Canterbury,’ at the latter a merchant ship. At Plymouth it was certainly raging enormously from June to the end of the year—“febris nautica pestilentialis jam saevit maxime,” says Huxham; it continued there all through the first half of 1741, “when it seemed to become lost in a fever of the bilious kind.” It was in the dry spring and very hot summer of 1741 that the fever became general over England. Wall says that it appeared at Worcester at the Spring Assizes among a few; at Exeter also it was traced to the gaol delivery; and it was commonly said that the turmoil of the General Election (which resulted in driving Walpole from his long term of power) helped its diffusion. But undoubtedly the great occasion of its universality was a widely felt scarcity. The rise in the price of wheat was small beside the enormous leaps that prices used to take in the medieval period, having been at no time double the average low price of that generation. It was rather the want of employment that made the pinch so sharp in 1741. The weaving towns of the west of England were losing their trade; of “most trades,” also, it was said that they were in apparent decay, “except those which supply luxury[130].” Dr Barker, of Sarum, the best medical writer upon the epidemic, says:
“The general poverty which has of late prevailed over a great part of this nation, and particularly amongst the woollen manufacturers in the west, where the fever has raged and still continues to rage with the greatest violence, affords but too great reason to believe that this has been one principal source of the disease[131].”
He explains that the price of wheat had driven the poor to live on bad bread. This is borne out by a letter from Wolverhampton, 27 November, 1741[132]. The writer speaks of the extraordinary havoc made among the poorer sort by the terrible fever that has for some time raged in most parts of England and Ireland. At first it seldom fixed on any but the poor people, and especially such as lived in large towns, workhouses, or prisons. Country people and farmers seemed for the most part exempt from it, “though we have observed it frequently in villages near market towns”; whereas, says the writer, the epidemic fevers of 1727, 1728 and 1729 were first observed to begin among the country people, and to be some time in advancing to large towns. This writer’s theory was that the fever was caused by bad bread, and he alleges that horse-beans, pease and coarse unsound barley were almost the only food of the poor. To this a Birmingham surgeon took exception[133]. Great numbers of the poor had, to his knowledge, lived almost entirely upon bean-bread, but had been very little afflicted with the fever. Besides, every practitioner knew that the fever was not confined to the poor. He pointed out that in Wolverhampton, whence the bad-bread theory emanated, the proportion of poor to those in easier circumstances was as six to one, poverty having increased so much by decay of trade that many wanted even the necessaries of life. The Birmingham surgeon was on the whole inclined to the theory of “the ingenious Sydenham, that the disease may be ascribed to a contagious quality in the air, arising from some secret and hidden alterations in the bowels of the earth, passing through the whole atmosphere, or to some malign influence in the heavenly bodies”—these being Sydenham’s words as applied to the fever of 1685-6.
Barker, also, draws a parallel between the epidemic of 1741 and that of 1685-86: the Thames was frozen in each of the two winters preceding the respective epidemics, and the spring and summer of 1740 and 1741 were as remarkable for drought and heat as those of 1684 and 1685.
In London the deaths from fever in 1741 reached the enormous figure of 7528, the highest total in the bills of mortality from first to last, while the deaths from all causes were 32,119, in a population of some 700,000, also the highest total from the year of the great plague until the new registration of the whole metropolitan area in 1838. It will be seen from the following table (on p. 81) of the weekly mortalities that the fever-deaths rose greatly in the autumn, but, unlike the old plague, reached a maximum in the winter.
The effects of the epidemic of typhus upon the weaving towns of the west of England, in which the fever lasted, as in London, into the spring of 1742, were seen at their worst in the instance of Tiverton. It was then a town of about 8000 inhabitants, having increased little during the last hundred years. Judged by the burials and baptisms in the parish register it was a more unhealthy place since the extinction of plague than it had been before that. It was mostly a community of weavers, who had not been in prosperous circumstances for sometime past. In 1735 the town had been burned down, and in 1738 it was the scene of riots. The hard winter of 1739-40 brought acute distress, and in 1741 spotted fever was so prevalent that 636 persons were buried in that year, being 1 in 12 of the inhabitants. At the height of the epidemic ten or eleven funerals were seen at one time in St Peter’s churchyard. Its population twenty years after is estimated to have declined by two thousand, and at the end of the 18th century it was a less populous place than at the beginning[134].
Mortality by Fever in London, 1741-42.
| Week ending | Fever | All causes | |||||
| 1741 | |||||||
| March | 10 | 123 | 660 | ||||
| 17 | 103 | 564 | |||||
| 24 | 112 | 624 | |||||
| 31 | 105 | 573 | |||||
| April | 7 | 123 | 670 | ||||
| 14 | 128 | 687 | |||||
| 21 | 89 | 580 | |||||
| 28 | 123 | 622 | |||||
| May | 5 | 104 | 495 | ||||
| 12 | 141 | 587 | |||||
| 19 | 129 | 573 | |||||
| 26 | 153 | 600 | |||||
| June | 2 | 138 | 512 | ||||
| 9 | 138 | 483 | |||||
| 16 | 115 | 536 | |||||
| 23 | 127 | 494 | |||||
| 30 | 154 | 513 | |||||
| July | 7 | 149 | 523 | ||||
| 14 | 162 | 551 | |||||
| 21 | 130 | 485 | |||||
| 28 | 151 | 621 | |||||
| Aug. | 4 | 128 | 512 | ||||
| 11 | 142 | 541 | |||||
| 18 | 172 | 636 | |||||
| 25 | 192 | 665 | |||||
| Sept. | 1 | 171 | 675 | ||||
| 8 | 190 | 691 | |||||
| 15 | 182 | 760 | |||||
| 22 | 199 | 748 | |||||
| 29 | 189 | 733 | |||||
| Oct. | 6 | 207 | 784 | ||||
| 13 | 192 | 787 | |||||
| 20 | 232 | 793 | |||||
| 27 | 234 | 850 | |||||
| Nov. | 3 | 250 | 835 | ||||
| 10 | 228 | 772 | |||||
| 17 | 182 | 670 | |||||
| 24 | 214 | 806 | |||||
| Dec. | 1 | 224 | 768 | ||||
| 8 | 203 | 748 | |||||
| 15 | 191 | 761 | |||||
| 22 | 179 | 775 | |||||
| 29 | 180 | 702 | |||||
| 1742 | |||||||
| Jan. | 5 | 221 | 893 | ||||
| 12 | 184 | 760 | |||||
| 19 | 151 | 724 | |||||
| Feb. | 2 | 132 | 675 | ||||
| 9 | 103 | 533 | |||||
| 16 | 108 | 675 | |||||
| 25 | 103 | 641 | |||||
Effects of the Epidemic of 1741-42 on Provincial Towns.
(Short’s Abstracts of Parish Registers.)
| Year | Registers examined | With burials more than baptisms | Baptisms in the same | Burials in the same | ||||
| 1740 | 27 | 6 | 1409 | 1940 | ||||
| 1741 | 27 | 14 | 3787 | 6205 | ||||
| 1742 | 26 | 6 | 1721 | 3345 |
Other parts of the kingdom may be represented by Norwich, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The record of baptisms in Norwich is almost certainly defective; in only two years from 1719 to 1741, is a small excess of baptisms over burials recorded, namely, in 1722 and 1726, while in a third year, 1736, the figures are exactly equal. In 1740 there are 916 baptisms to 1173 burials, and in 1741, 851 baptisms to 1456 burials; while in 1742, owing to an epidemic of smallpox, the deaths rose to 1953, or to more than double the recorded births[135]. The distress was felt most in East Anglia in 1740. Blomefield, who ends his history in that year, says there was much rioting throughout the kingdom, “on the pretence of the scarcity and dearness of grain.” At Wisbech Assizes fourteen were found guilty, but were not all executed. In Norfolk two were convicted and executed accordingly. At Norwich the military fired upon the mob and killed seven persons, of whom only one was truly a rioter[136]. It was also in the severe winter of 1739-40 that the distress began in Edinburgh. The mills were stopped by ice and snow, causing a scarcity of meal; the harvest of 1740 was bad, riots took place in October, and granaries were plundered[137]. The deaths from fever were many in 1740, but were nearly doubled in 1741, with a significant accompaniment of fatal dysentery[138]:
Edinburgh Mortalities, 1740-41.
(Population in 1732, estimated at 32,000.)[139]
| 1740 | 1741 | |||
| All causes | 1237 | 1611 | ||
| Consumption | 278 | 349 | ||
| Fever | 161 | 304 | ||
| Flux | 3 | 36 | ||
| Smallpox | 274 | 206 | ||
| Measles | 100 | 112 | ||
| Chincough | 26 | 101 | ||
| Convulsions | 22 | 16 |
The last four items are of children’s maladies, for which Edinburgh was worse reputed even than London.
At Newcastle the deaths in the register in 1741 were 320 more than in 1740, in which year they were doubtless excessive, as elsewhere. But there is a significant addition: “There have also been buried upwards of 400 upon the Ballast Hills near this town[140].”
The symptoms of the epidemic fever of 1741-42 are described by Barker, of Salisbury, and Wall, of Worcester[141]. It began like a common cold, as was remarked also in Ireland. On the seventh day spots appeared like fleabites on the breast and arms; in some there were broad purple spots like those of scurvy. Miliary eruptions were apt to come out about the eleventh day, especially in women. In most, after the first six or seven days, there was a wonderful propensity to diarrhoea, which might end in dysentery. The cough, which had appeared at the outset, went off about the ninth day, when stupor and delirium came on. Gilchrist, of Dumfries, describes the fever there in November, 1741, as more malignant than the “nervous fever” which he had described in 1735. It came to an end about the fourteenth day; the sick were almost constantly under a coma or raving, and they died of an absolute oppression of the brain; a profuse sweat about the seventh day was followed by an aggravation of all the symptoms[142]. An anonymous writer, dating from Sherborne, uses the occasion to make an onslaught upon blood-letting[143].