The Influenza of 1733.

The next influenza was three years after that of 1729—in January, 1733. In London, it raised the weekly deaths for a couple of weeks to a far greater height than the preceding had done. Also the purely catarrhal symptoms of running from the eyes and nose are more prominent in the accounts for 1733 than for the influenza of 1729. The first notice of it comes from Edinburgh. The horses having been “attacked with running of the nose and coughs towards the end of October and beginning of November,” the same symptoms began suddenly among men on the 17th December, 1732[622]. By the 25th the epidemic was general in Edinburgh, very few escaping, and it continued in that city until the middle of January, 1733. In a great many it began with a running of lymph at the eyes and nose, which continued for a day. Generally the patients were inclined to sweat, and some had profuse sweats. It was noted as remarkable that the prisoners in the gaol escaped; also the boys in Heriot’s Hospital, as well as the inhabitants of houses near to that charity. The Edinburgh deaths rose as in the following table; the bulk of these extra burials are said to have been at the public charges, the epidemic having swept away a great number of poor, old, and consumptive people:

BuriedinNovember, 1732 89
""December, 1732 109
""January, 1733 214
""February, 1733 135

Hillary[623] fixes the date of its beginning at Leeds on 3 February, one week later than at York, three weeks later than at Newcastle, or than in London and the south of England generally. At Leeds in three days’ time about one-third part of the people were seized with chills, catarrh, violent cough, sneezing and coryza; the epidemic lasted five or six weeks in the town and country near. Dr John Arbuthnot, who was then living in Dover Street, is clear that the outbreak in London was later than in Edinburgh, which indeed appears also from the paragraph in the Gentleman’s Magazine, dated Wednesday the 11th January, and from a comparison of the dates of highest mortalities in London (p. 349) and Edinburgh. It was in Saxony from the 15th November to the 29th of that month, and in Holland before it broke out in England. But it had begun in New England in the middle of October, and had broken out soon after in Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru. Its outbreak in Paris was at the beginning of February, 1733, and at Naples in March. The symptoms, says Arbuthnot, were uniform in every place—small rigors, pains in the back, a thin defluxion occasioning sneezing, a cough with expectoration. In France the fever ended after several days in miliary eruptions, in Holland often in imposthumations of the throat. In some, the cough outlasted the fever six weeks or two months. The horses were seized with the catarrh before mankind[624].

The account of the influenza of 1733 in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine is under the date of 11 January: “About this time coughs and colds began to grow so rife that scarce a family escaped them, which carried off a good many, both old and young. The distemper discovered itself by a shivering in the limbs, a pain in the head, and a difficulty of breathing. The remedies prescribed were various, but especially bleeding, drinking cold water, small broths, and such thin liquids as dilute the blood[625].”

Huxham says that it was in Cornwall and the west of Devon in February, 1733, and that at Plymouth, on the 10th of that month, some were suddenly seized: “the day after they fell down in multitudes, and on the 18th or 20th of March, scarce anyone had escaped it.”

It began with slight shivering, followed by transient erratic heats, headache, violent sneezing, flying pains in the back and chest, violent cough, a running of thin sharp mucus from the nose and mouth. A slight fever followed, with the pulse quick, but not hard or tense. The urine was thick and whitish, the sediment yellowish-white, seldom red. Several had racking pain in the head, many had singing in the ears and pain in the meatus auditorius, where sometimes an abscess formed: exulcerations and swelling of the fauces were likewise very common. The sick were in general much given to sweating, which, when it broke out of its own accord and was very plentiful, continuing without striking in again, did often in the space of two or three days carry off the fever. The disorder in other cases terminated with a discharge of bilious matter by stool, and sometimes by the breaking forth of fiery pimples. It was rarely fatal, and then mostly to infants and old worn out people. Generally it went off about the fourth day, leaving a troublesome cough often of long duration, “and such dejection of strength as one would hardly have suspected from the shortness of the time.” The cough in all was very vehement, hardly to be subdued by anodynes: and it was so protracted in some as to throw them into consumption, which carried them off within a month or two[626].

Huxham is unusually full on the coughs and anginas of horses for several months before the influenza of men. In August, 1732, coughs were troubling some horses; in September, a coughing angina (called “the strangles”) everywhere among horses which almost suffocates most of them; in October the disease of horses is raging at its worst; and in December it is still among them.