The parish register of Finchley has a remarkable entry under the year 1596 which introduces us to other considerations: “Hoc anno moriebantur de dysenteria xix,” the whole number of burials for the year having been 28. Next year, 1597, there are 23 deaths from dysentery, the burials in all having been 48—an enormous mortality compared with the average of the parish. The year 1597, if not also 1596, was a year of great scarcity, apparently all over England; in Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland, the scarcity was attended by plague proper; but in other parts of England, it would seem, by other types of sickness, of which dysentery was one.
One of the 16th century English names used for flux was the obsolete word lask, which occurs often enough in writings of the period to suggest that the malady was common; it is sometimes called a choleric lask (cholera morbus), or a vehement lask, as in Elyot’s Castel of Health and in Cogan’s Haven of Health. Lasks, or lienteries, or dysenteries have not been dealt with in a chapter by themselves because the records of them are too few and meagre, so far as we have gone in the history; but it may be convenient to bring together here the better known instances. In the period of famine-sicknesses, dysentery and lientery must have been common types, the latter being specially mentioned by Rishanger of St Albans for the year 1294. Trokelowe, another St Albans chronicler, writing of the famine-sickness of 1315-16, uses the singular phrase “morbus enim dysentericus ex corruptis cibis fere omnes maculavit” and says it was followed by “acuta febris vel pestis gutturuosa.” Dysentery from corrupt food is again specially named for the year 1391. The “wame-ill” was the prevalent type of sickness in the great Scots famine of 1439, a year of famine in England and France. When we next hear of it in English history it is among the troops of the marquis of Dorset in Gascony and Biscay in 1512, some 1800 of them having died of “the flix.” Then comes the “great lask throughout the realm” in 1540, associated with “strange fevers.” The sickly years 1557-58 and 1580-82 had probably some dysentery, or lientery, either as primary maladies or as complications of the fevers: Cogan’s generalities imply as much for 1580-82, and we know that the corresponding sickly period a century after (1657-59) was so characterised in the description by Willis. The fatal infection in the fleet after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, in August, 1588, was probably dysentery and ship-fever. Many other instances of the kind remain to be given in the chapter on the sicknesses of voyages and colonial settlements.
Dysentery begins to be heard of more frequently in the Stuart period, as a malady of London. It is a prominent item, along with summer diarrhoea, in the London bills of mortality from the year 1658, under the name “griping of the guts,” and is occasionally mentioned in letters from London about the same years. The dysentery of London in 1669 was the subject of Sydenham’s observations, who says that it had been rarely seen in the preceding ten years[823]. On the other hand he speaks of “the endemic dysentery of Ireland,” although he is not sure as to its type or species[824]. Statements as to the Irish “country disease,” are as old as Giraldus Cambrensis[825]; but as the whole question of dysentery is intimately bound up with that of typhus-fever, I shall reserve consideration of its prevalence in Ireland on the great scale, as well as of the annual mortality from it in the London bills of the 17th century, until that section of the work in which fevers and the maladies akin to them come into the first rank as if in lieu of the plague.
Note. A sweating character in the “hot agues” or fevers of the Elizabethan period, in those of 1580-82 as well as in those of 1557-58, is asserted in several passages in the text. It is noteworthy that in Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s early comedies, the bawd says: “Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk” (Act I. Scene 2).
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FRENCH POX.
One great epidemic disease of the first Tudor reigns, which brought consternation and distress to multitudes, makes hardly any appearance in the English records of the time, and no appearance at all in the writings of the English profession. Long after, in 1576, William Clowes, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, first broke the professional silence about lues venerea in England, and in his larger work of 1579 he gave a number of startling facts and figures of its then prevalence in London. But the great epidemic outburst of that disease in Europe began in the last years of the 15th century; its ravages on the epidemic scale are supposed to have lasted for twenty or thirty years from 1494; and its subsequent prevalence is assumed, not without reason, to have been of a milder type and within narrower limits. We hear of it, in England, from the political side, at the time when popular arguments were wanted against the Romish mass-priests and against the monasteries and the orders of friars. In the practical reasoning of Englishmen the scandalous lives of priests, monks and friars made the strongest argument for the policy which the king had adopted towards Rome; and it so happened in those very years that a scandalous life was betrayed, and made odious in more than sentiment, by bearing an outward and visible sign. The epidemic of morbus Gallicus arose at an unfortunate time for the pretensions of Rome, or, perhaps, it was itself part of the march of events. In Simon Fish’s Supplication of Beggars, which was compiled in 1524 and was read to Henry VIII. shortly after, the weightiest plea is the charge of scandalous conduct resting upon the priests. In the inquisitions which preceded the suppression of the monasteries, the same plea is, justly or unjustly, brought to the front in the case of one abbey after another. So close did the association of a scandalous vice and its attendant disease become with the priesthood that James I., writing long after concerning the sentiments of his mother, Mary the queen of Scots, represents her as forbidding the archbishop “to use the spittle” in his own baptism, for the reason that she would not have “a pokie priest to spet in her child’s mouth[826].” These, says king James, were “her owne very words;” at all events, “a pocky priest” may be accepted as a phrase of the time. The fact that the epidemic of syphilis in England was used to discredit Romish priests is one of the few indications that we have of its existence in this country. Wide and deep as the commotion must have been which it caused, it found hardly any more permanent expression than the private talk of the men of those days. It was otherwise on the Continent. There, indeed, a copious literature sprang up, of which some thirty works remain, from the essay of Conrad Schellig of Heidelberg, printed without date or place, but ascribed to the year 1494 or 1495, down to the elaborate survey of the disease by Nicolas Massa of Venice in 1532. The single work extant in England from that, the earliest and greatest, period of the disease, is a poor piece of manuscript in the Sloane collection, translated from some foreign author, and entitled, “The tretese of the pokkis: and the cure by the nobull counsell of parris[827].” One of its cases is that of a man, aged forty, with two broad and deep, corroding and painful sores on his leg; another is of a bishop of Toledo, who had “pustules” and nocturnal pains “as if the bones would part from the flesh.” The vague meaning of the term pox is shown in one phrase, “paynes, viz. aches and pokkis.”