The Influenza of 1847-48.

The great influenza of 1847 began in London about the 16th or 18th of November, was at its height from the 22nd to the 30th, had “ceased to be very prevalent” by the 6th or 8th of December, but affected the bills of mortality for some time longer, as in the following table:

Weekly Mortalities in London.

1847

Week ending		All causes	Influenza	Pneumonia	Bronchitis	Asthma	Typhus
Nov.	20	1086	4	95	61	12	86
	27	1677	36	170	196	77	87
Dec.	4	2454	198	306	343	86	132
	11	2416	374	294	299	78	136
	18	1946	270	189	234	52	131
	25	1247	142	131	107	14	83
Jan.	1	1599	127	148	138	26	74

In the thirteen weeks of the first quarter of 1848 the influenza deaths declined as follows: 102, 102, 89, 56, 59, 47, 27, 33, 18, 11, 10, 16, 8.

This was the first great epidemic of influenza under the new system of registration. According to the Superintendent of Statistics, it caused an excess of 5000 deaths during the six weeks that it lasted, of which about a fourth part only were set down to influenza, and the rest to pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, etc. During the three worst weeks it raised the deaths in the age of childhood 83 per cent., in the age of manhood 104 per cent., in old age 247 per cent., whereas the deaths between fifteen years and twenty-five were but little raised by it, and those between ten and fifteen hardly at all. It raised the deaths during six weeks in St George’s-in-the East to a rate per annum of 73 per 1000 living: in some other parishes it increased the death-rate very little. But it had the usual effect of lengthening enormously the obituary columns of the newspapers, which shows that it fell, as usual, to a large extent upon the richer classes. It went all over England in a short time, the month of December being the time of excessive mortality in the towns, according to the following sample totals of deaths from all causes:

1847

	Manchester (Ancoats)	Sheffield (West)	York (Walmgate)	Places in Scotland
October	169	27	61	521
November	135	27	52	728
December	270	85	99	1001

In some parts of England, as in Kendal, a district of Anglesea and in the Isle of Wight, the mortality of the last quarter of 1847 was actually lower than that of the year before. From St Albans the sub-registrar reported that there had been “no epidemic.” In most parts of the country, including the medium-sized towns, the mortality directly or indirectly due to influenza was lower than in London. The principal returns did not come in from the country until after the new year, the effects of the epidemic having been, as usual, later in rural districts. Hence, while London had 1253 deaths put down to “influenza” in 1847 (nearly all in December), and 659 in 1848 (nearly all in the first quarter), the rest of England had 4881 influenza deaths before the New Year, and 7963 after it[742]. This influenza in the mid-winter of 1847-8 made a great impression everywhere[743]. As regards its range and its fatality, it was like those of 1833 and 1837; and it had once more so much of the catarrhal type, that the name of influenza became still more firmly joined to the idea of a feverish cold or defluxion.

By the year 1847, agues had almost ceased to be written of in England, although they still occurred in the Fens. But Peacock begins his account of the influenza of that winter with an enumeration of prevailing diseases, which reads somewhat like an old “constitution” by Sydenham or Huxham. The summers and autumns of 1846 and 1847, he says, were both highly choleraic, and dysentery (as well as enteric fever) was unusually common in the former year. Fatal cases of “ague and remittent fever” were also more numerous than usual. Then came much enteric fever, “not unfrequently complicated with catarrhal symptoms.” Throughout the spring and early summer of the influenza year, 1847, “intermittent fevers were common, and in March, April and May, purpura was frequently met with, either as a primary or secondary disease. Scurvy also, owing to the deficiency of fresh vegetables, and from the general failure of the potato crop in the previous year was occasionally seen.” Then follows much concerning a fever called remittent, which reads more like relapsing fever than anything else[744]. “The remittent form of fever was frequent in the course of the epidemic [of influenza], though seldom registered as the cause of death.” Peacock says truly that the rather unusual concurrence of so many sicknesses was “not peculiar to the recent influenza alone;” and he can “scarcely refrain from acknowledging that these several affections are not merely coetaneous but correlative, and types and modifications of one disease, with which they have a common origin. Assuming this inference to be admitted, we may advance to the solution of the further question of what is the essential nature or proximate cause of the disease.” But the inquiry led him to no result: the precise cause he leaves “involved in the obscurity that veils the origin of epidemics generally”—which are surely not all equally obscure[745].

Influenza having continued epidemic for a few weeks in the beginning of 1848, ceased thereafter to attract popular notice in Britain during a period of more than forty years. But a certain number of “influenza” deaths continued to appear steadily year after year in the registration tables. In 1851 this number was nearly doubled, in 1855 it was more than trebled; and those two years were undoubtedly seasons (about January and February) of real influenza epidemics in Europe, recorded by several but not by English writers. A slight epidemic was described for Scotland in 1857, and one for Norfolk in 1878, neither of which seems to have influenced the registration returns in an obvious degree. After the undoubted influenza of 1855, the annual total of deaths in England set down to that cause steadily declined from four figures, to three figures, and then to two figures, standing at 55 in the bill of mortality for 1889. It is improbable that those small annual totals of deaths in all England and Wales were caused by the real influenza; the name at that time was synonymous with a feverish cold, and would have been given here or there to fatalities from some such ordinary cause. An epidemic ague was reported from Somerset in 1858[746].