The Influenza of 1743.

Six years after, in 1743, came another influenza, which presents some interesting points. A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May, 1743, says that the epidemic began in September last in Saxony, that it progressed to Milan, Genoa, and Venice, and to Florence and Rome, where it was called the Influenza; in February last (1743) no fewer than 80,000 were sick of it [? in Rome] and 500 buried in one day. At Messina it was suspected to be the forerunner of a plague—which did, indeed, ensue. It is now (May) in Spain, depopulating whole villages. The outbreak in Italy is authenticated by many notices collected by Corradi, Brescia having had the epidemic in October, 1742, Milan and Venice in November, Bologna in December, Rome, Pisa, Leghorn, Florence and Genoa in January, 1743, Naples and the Sicilian towns in February. The English troops, in cantonments near Brussels, were little touched by it when it reached that capital about the end of February, but, strangely enough, “many who in the preceding autumn had been seized with intermittents then relapsed[629].”

In London the epidemic appears to have begun in the end of March, and had trebled the deaths in the week ending 12th April; by the beginning of May it was practically over.

London Weekly Mortalities.

1743

Week
ending		 Fevers All causes
March 29 94 579
April5 189 1013
12 300 1448
19 223 1026
26 115 629
May3 82 537

The familiar view of the influenza in London is given in a letter by Horace Walpole from Arlington Street, 25 March, 1743[630]:

“We have had loads of sunshine all the winter: and within these ten days nothing but snows, north-east winds and blue plagues. The last ships have brought over all your epidemic distempers; not a family in London has scaped under five or six ill; many people have been forced to hire new labourers. Guernier, the apothecary, took two new apprentices, and yet could not drug all his patients. It is a cold and fever. I had one of the worst, and was blooded on Saturday and Sunday, but it is quite gone; my father was blooded last night; his is but slight. The physicians say there has been nothing like it since the year thirty-three, and then not so bad [the bill of mortality almost the same]; in short our army abroad would shudder to see what streams of blood have been let out! Nobody has died of it [as yet, but later some 1000 in a week above the usual bill] but old Mr Eyres of Chelsea, through obstinacy of not bleeding; and his ancient Grace of York; Wilcox of Rochester succeeds him, who is fit for nothing in the world but to die of this cold too.”

The account in the Gentleman’s Magazine confirms the vast shedding of blood: “In the last two months it visited almost every family in the city; so that the surgeons and all the phlebotomists had full employment. Bleeding, sweating and blistering were the remedies usually prescribed. All over the island it cut off old people. At Greenwich upwards of twenty hospital men and boys were buried in a night[631].” In Edinburgh, as in London, the weekly burials were trebled. On Sunday, May 6th, fifty sick persons were prayed for in the Edinburgh churches, and in the preceding week there had been seventy burials in the Greyfriars, being three times the usual number[632]. It reached Dublin in May, proving milder and less fatal than in London (perhaps that is why the writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine says it did not visit Ireland at all); it visited, also, the remote parts of Ulster and Munster, scarce sparing a family[633].

It had reached Plymouth in the end of April. Huxham, who is again the chief witness to its symptoms, says that it was much less severe there than in the south of Europe or even than in London.

Innumerable persons were seized at once with a wandering kind of shiver and heaviness in the head; presently also came on a pain therein, as well as in the joints and back; several, however, were troubled with a universal lassitude. Immediately there ensued a very great and acrid defluxion from the eyes, nostrils and fauces, and very often falling upon the lungs, which occasioned almost perpetual sneezings, and commonly a violent cough. The tongue looked as if rubbed with cream. The eyes were slightly inflamed; and, being violently painful in the bottom of the orbit, shunned the light. The greater part of the sick had easy, equal and kindly sweats the second or third day, which, with the large spitting, gave relief. Great loss of strength, however, remained. Frequently towards the end of this “feveret,” several red angry pustules broke out: often, likewise, a sudden, nay a profuse, diarrhoea with violent griping. In many cases Huxham was astonished at the vast sediment (yellowish white), which the urine threw down, “than which there could not be a more favourable symptom[634].” One remarkable feature of the epidemic of 1743 was recalled by W. Watson in a letter to Huxham on the epidemic of 1762: “In the disorder of 1743 the skin was very frequently inflamed when the fever ran high; and it afterwards peeled off in most parts of the body[635].”