Typhus in England and Scotland generally, in the end of the 18th century.

The introduction of machinery and the building of mills brought typhus fever to places much less crowded than Leeds, or Manchester, or Carlisle.

Dr David Campbell of Lancaster saw much of typhus in that town, and in mill villages near it, in the years 1782, 1783, and 1784. In Lancaster town he saw about 500 cases, of which 168 were in men, with 20 deaths, 236 in women, with 11 deaths, and 94 in children under fourteen, with 3 deaths. At Backbarrow cotton mill, twenty miles from Lancaster, there were 180 cases, of which 38 were in men, with 5 deaths, 11 in women, with 2 deaths, and 131 in children under fourteen, with no deaths[269]. At this mill there was an extremely offensive smell in the rooms, which came from the privy; the doors of the latter, “for indispensable reasons in the economy of these works, where so many children are employed, always communicate with the workrooms.” Every care had been taken to keep the air sweet, but without effect. The offensive smell was in all the cotton mills from the same cause; and in the Radcliffe mill belonging to Mr Peel, the typhus was ascribed to that source, the nuisance having been at length got rid of. Both at Backbarrow and Radcliffe the houses of the workpeople were new, airy and comfortable. In the same years typhus raged with uncommon severity at Ulverston and in various parts of Lancashire, where cotton-mills had been set up[270].

The typhus of Liverpool and Newcastle was reproduced in Whitehaven and Cockermouth on a scale proportionate to their size. Whitehaven, the port of the Cumberland coal-field, was the Newcastle of the west coast, and had a large trade with Ireland. Many of the labourers lived in cellars. Brownrigg’s experiences of typhus fever in it went back to near the middle of the 18th century. The Whitehaven Dispensary was opened in 1783, the occasion for it being thus explained:—

“Previous to the establishment of dispensaries Whitehaven and Cockermouth were infested by nervous and putrid fever. Many of their respectable inhabitants became its victims; and among the lower class of people it prevailed with deplorable malignancy. The present period happily exhibits a different picture. Notwithstanding our connection with the metropolis of Ireland, and other commercial places, contagion rarely appears; or, when accidentally introduced, is readily suppressed[271].”

The following is the abstract of “contagious fever cases” from the records of the Whitehaven Dispensary from 30 June, 1783, to 9 June, 1800[272]:

Year Cured Dead Total
1783 75 1 76
1784 401 9 410
1785 350 20 370
1786 91 6 97
1787 21 1 22
1788 53 7 60
1789 103 2 105
1790 288 21 309
1791 74 6 79
1792 17 2 19
1793 7 3 10
1794 13 1 14
1795 28 2 30
1796 48 1 49
1797 35 2 37
1798 12 1 13
1799 11 1 12
Total 1627 85 1712

The year 1790 is indicated as an unhealthy one, by the excess of burials over christenings, also at Macclesfield, where there were 316 christenings to 380 burials, the proportion being usually the other way[273].

Dr John Alderson of Hull wrote in 1788 an essay on the contagion of fever, in which there are no authentic details for Hull: “The calamity itself is the constant complaint of every neighbourhood, and almost every newspaper presents us with an example of the direful consequences of infection”—the reference being to gaols more particularly[274]. Whatever was the reason, there was undoubtedly a great deal of typhus in England in the eighties of the eighteenth century. Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire experienced much typhus from 1782 to 1785, although we have few particulars. “The remembrance of its ravages at Gloucester, Worcester and Marlborough,” says Dr Wall of Oxford, “is still fresh in every mind, where its virulence proved so peculiarly fatal to the medical world.” At Aylesbury, Dr Kennedy survived an attack of the “contagious fever,” to write an account (1785) of the epidemic, which he traced to the gaol (the date, be it observed, is subsequent to Howard’s visitations)[275]. At Maidstone, also, in 1785, the gaol fever was the subject of a special account[276].

At Worcester in 1783 the younger Dr Johnstone caught typhus while visiting the gaol, which was thereafter rebuilt at great expense. A prisoner took it to Droitwich where 14 died[277].

Dr Wall gives clinical details of fifteen cases of typhus treated by him in private practice at Oxford in 1785; one of his patients was an apothecary whose business had exposed him very much to the influence of contagion, as he was much employed amongst the poor in the suburbs of the town and neighbouring villages and in the House of Industry[278]. In the year 1783-85, much of the epidemic fever was of the nature of ague, as described in another chapter. It is not always easy to separate it from typhus; but there is no doubt that both were prevalent together. Thus in the parish of Painswick, Gloucestershire, in the spring of 1785 there occurred both “a contagious fever” and an “epidemic ague,” the latter having left a good many persons dropsical and cachectic[279]. This had been part of an epidemical fever which had raged for some time in the county of Gloucestershire, and is said to have lately carried off a great number of poor. At Norton, within five miles of Gloucester, there lived in two adjoining tenements two families: in one a man and his wife and three children, in the other a man and his wife, of whom only one remained alive on the 1st of March, 1785[280].

The extraordinary failure of the harvest in Scotland in 1782 produced much distress, and with it fever, in the winter following. The Glasgow and Edinburgh municipalities imported grain for the public benefit. Various traces of the scarcity and fever appear in the Statistical Account written a few years after. Thus, in Holywood parish, Dumfriesshire, some fevers were wont to appear in February and March among people of low circumstances living in a narrow valley; and the unusual mortality in the dear year 1782 was owing to an infectious fever in the same cottages. In the regular bills of mortality of Torthorwald parish, Dumfriesshire, the deaths from “fever” fall in the dear years, 1782-3, 1785, &c. In Dunscore parish, in the same county, the burials of 1782 rose to the most unusual figure of 30 (the baptisms being 17), “owing to a malignant fever[281].”

But Scotland was now past the danger of actual famine from even a total failure of the harvest. Some farmers were ruined, and many more were unable to pay the year’s rent; but the very poorest were enabled to find food, one source being “the importation of white pease from America.” From Delting, in Shetland, one of the poorest parishes, the report is: “There is reason to believe that none died from mere want; but there is no doubt that many, from the unwholesome food, contracted diseases that brought them to their graves.”

The following relating to the parishes of Keithhall and Kinkell, Aberdeenshire, in the scarcity following the lost harvest of 1782, is a curiously detailed glimpse of the time:

“Several families who would not allow their poverty to be known lived on two diets of meal a day. One family wanted food from Friday night till Sunday at dinner. On the last Friday of December, 1782, the country people could get no meal in Aberdeen, as the citizens were afraid of a famine; and a poor man, in this district, could find none in the country the day after. But the distress of this family being discovered, they were supplied. Next day the [Kirk] session bought at a sale a considerable quantity of bere, which was made into meal. This served the poor people until the importation at Aberdeen became regular, and every man of humanity rejoiced that the danger of famine was removed[282].”

We hear most of fevers in the Highland parishes, with their subdivisions of holdings and an excess of population. Thus of Gairloch, Ross-shire, it is said: “Fevers are frequent, sometimes they are of a favourable kind, at other times they continue long and carry off great numbers”—the poor in this parish, upon the Kirk Session roll, numbering 84 in the year 1792, and the aggregate money paid to the whole number averaging £6. 7s. in a year, whereas the fertile parish of Ellon, Aberdeenshire, with 40 on the poor’s roll, paid them £43 per annum.

Again, of the fishing village of Eyemouth, it is said: “The only complaints that prove mortal in this place are different kinds of fevers and consumptions; and these are mostly confined to the poorest class of people, and ascribed to their scanty diet.” And of another fishing parish, in Banffshire, Fordyce, including Portsoy, it is said: “The most prevalent distemper is a fever, and that for the most part not universal, but confined to particular districts. It is sometimes thought to arise from infection and communication with other parts of the country; at other times from local situations and circumstances of the people’s houses and habits of living in particular districts[283].”

The beginning of the great French war was the occasion of a considerable increase of fever; although no records make it appear so fatal a time as the years 1783-86. The commercial distress and want of work which began in the autumn of 1792, were intensified by the bad harvests of 1794 and 1795, which followed two harvests also deficient. This was the period of distress and of epidemic fever to which Wordsworth referred in the passage in the first book of the ‘Excursion,’ where he is relating the story of Margaret’s ruined cottage[284].

There is little medical writing upon the epidemic fever of 1794-95; and, in the very district of Wordsworth’s story, the records of the Whitehaven Dispensary bear no traces of a great concourse of patients. There is reason to think that the fever, if slow and weakening, was seldom fatal, that it was typhus mitior, and that it was sometimes, perhaps often, relapsing. One glimpse we get of it in the family of the afterwards celebrated Dr Edward Jenner of Berkeley, in the winter of 1794-95. He thus writes to a friend about the visitation of “grim-visaged typhus:”

“You shall hear the history of our calamities. First fell Henry’s [his nephew and assistant] wife and sister. From the early use of bark, they both appeared to recover; but the former, after going about her ordinary business for some days, had a dreadful relapse which nearly destroyed her. It was during my attendance on this case that the venomed arrow wounded me.... Like Mrs Jenner’s fever, at an early period there was a clear intermission for four days.... On the eighth day after the first seizure it again set in, in good earnest, and continued one-and-twenty days.... Dr Parry was with me from Bath five times, Dr Hicks and Dr Ludlow as many, and my friend George was never absent from my bedside.... But, to return to that mansion of melancholy, Henry’s. His infant girl has now the fever; a servant maid in the house is dying with it; and to complete this tragical narrative, about five days ago fell poor Henry himself. His symptoms at present are such as one might expect: violent pain in the head, vertigo, debility, transient shiverings.... His pulse this evening is sunk from 125 to 100. The stench from the poor girl is so great as to fill the house with putrid vapour; and I shall remove him this morning by means of a sedan-chair to a cottage near my own house[285].”

This is a tolerably clear picture of a short-period fever with relapses, or of relapsing fever strictly so-called; the stench, also, of one patient is characteristic. Barker, of Coleshill or Birmingham, has much to say under the same year 1794, of a slow, tedious fever, marked by “sluggish action and comatose symptoms,” and much subject to relapses; but he does not give the duration of the first or subsequent paroxysms, as Jenner does, or the usual length of the clear intervals, his most definite case being of a young woman who died in twenty-four hours from a relapse which came on about three weeks after the fever had left her[286].

It was the access of fever in 1794-5, and the alarm that it caused among the richer classes, that led to the opening of the Manchester House of Recovery in 1796. In certain streets in the neighbourhood chosen for the hospital, Portland Street, Silver Street and others in the same block, the cases of contagious fever for nearly three years before the hospital was opened are given by Ferriar as follows:

Sept. 1793 to Sept. 1794,casesoffever,400
Sept. 1794 to Sept. 1795,"""389
Sept. 1795 to May 1796,"""267

The cases began to be sent to the hospital on the 27th May, 1796, and an attempt was made to extinguish contagion in the houses, by white-washing, disinfecting and the like; so that in the same group of streets there were only 25 cases of fever from 13 July, 1794 to 13 March, 1797. Meanwhile the admissions to the hospital were few until the dearth of 1799-1802. One of the manufacturing towns which is known to have shared in the epidemic fever of 1794-96 was Ashton-under-Lyne, where upwards of three hundred cases (with few deaths) occurred in less than three months at the end of 1795. This epidemic must have been somewhat special to Ashton, for it produced much alarm in neighbouring places and caused Ashton to be avoided from fear of infection.

Shortly after 1796, Ferriar made an inquiry into an epidemic of fever at a village within a mile of Manchester; the houses were many of them new, built for the convenience of a large cotton mill; but even the new houses were offensive, with cellars occupied by lodgers, and almost every house overcrowded. This was the first fever in the village, and it was traced to a family who had come from Manchester with infected clothes. Stockport about the same time erected a House of Recovery, having “the same general causes of fever which render the disease so common in Manchester”; and Ferriar adds: “I believe there is not a town in the kingdom containing four thousand inhabitants which would not be greatly benefited by similar establishments.”

The bad harvest of 1794 raised the price of wheat to 55s. 7d. on 1 January, 1795, and the prospect of another short harvest to 77s. 2d. on 1 July. A famine being threatened, the Government caused neutral ships bound to French ports with corn to be seized, and brought into English ports, the owners receiving an ample profit. Agents were also sent to the Baltic to buy corn. By these means the price of wheat, which had risen in August to 108s. 4d., fell in October to 76s. 9d. Parliament met on the 29th October, and various measures were taken[287]. In the spring of 1796, the climax of distress was reached, wheat being at 100s. per quarter. The harvest of 1796 was abundant and wheat fell to 57s. 3d. The harvests of 1797 and 1798 were not equally good, but they were not altogether bad, and the price of wheat kept about 50s. for nearly three years, which were years of comparative comfort between the dearth of 1794-96 and the dearth of 1799-1802.