Like the greater plagues of 1603 and 1625, that of 1636 appears to have begun in the suburbs[1053]. Taylor, the Water-poet, in reprinting his poem on the plague of 1625, with some notes for 1636, says that of 1076 plague-deaths from April 7 to July 28 (the summation in the annual bill comes to 864), only 40 had occurred within the walls, so that the general infection of the City must have followed that of the Liberties and out-parishes. As early in the epidemic as 31 May, according to a record of the Middlesex Sessions, “the plague increases most at Stepney,” wherefore the Greengoose Fair at Stratford was prohibited, (the parish of Stepney extending as far as Shoreditch)[1054]. From Taylor we learn that Gravesend and Faversham had calamitous visitations, and that the infection was in many other towns and villages.
The epidemic of 1636 was like the plague of 1625 in having been preceded by much typhus fever in London, and accompanied by the same, as many as 2360 deaths being put down to fever in the plague-year in the classified causes of death now issued regularly (since 1629) in their printed bills by the Parish Clerks’ Hall. The letters and state papers of the time bear witness to the usual exodus from the City, the movements of the Court, and personal incidents, which have no farther interest after the samples given for 1625. One incident relating to the worst week of the plague in London in 1636 is preserved: eleven persons were committed to Newgate on 5 October for going with one Samuel Underhill, a trumpeter, who died of the plague, to his grave with trumpets and swords drawn in the night time in Shoreditch[1055]. The profession still makes no appearance in the way of epidemiological writing; but some “necessary directions” were drawn up by the College of Physicians, in substance the same as certain statutes issued on the alarm of plague in 1630[1056].
Next year, 1637, the plague continued in London, causing 3082 deaths out of a total of 11,763 in the bills. In 1638 there were only 363 plague-deaths, but the total mortality was 13,624, or nearly 2000 more than in the previous year, when plague alone had claimed its 3000. What were the epidemic types of disease that caused the high mortality in 1638?
Fever in London.
There ought to have been no difficulty in answering the question. The causes of death in the metropolis had been assigned in the books kept at Parish Clerks’ Hall since 1604, and had been printed since 1629. The printed series was in the hands of Graunt, from 1629 down to the date of his writing, January 1662; and he did abstract the deaths under each head of disease and casualty from 1629 to 1636 inclusive, and again from 1647 to 1661; but the ten years from 1637 to 1646 inclusive, he omitted as presenting nothing of importance and as being “inconsistent with the capacity” of his sheet of paper[1057]. All the original documents prior to 1658 appear to have been lost in the fire of 1666, so that Graunt’s omission cannot now be made good. One could wish that the worthy citizen had made no difficulty about the size of his paper. The omitted years are not only those of great political revolution, which may have had an effect upon the public health, but they are of special interest for the beginning of that great period of fever and smallpox in London which continued all through the 18th century.
The following section of London mortality, down to the end of our present period, will show, by reference to the total deaths, how important the omitted years are for the epidemiological history.
| Year | Plague | Fever | Smallpox | Total deaths | ||||
| 1629 | 0 | 956 | 72 | 8771 | ||||
| 1630 | 1317 | 1091 | 40 | 10554 | ||||
| 31 | 274 | 1115 | 58 | 8562 | ||||
| 32 | 8 | 1108 | 531 | 9535 | ||||
| 33 | 0 | 953 | 72 | 8393 | ||||
| 34 | 1 | 1279 | 1354 | 10400 | ||||
| 35 | 0 | 1622 | 293 | 10651 | ||||
| 36 | 10400 | 2360 | 127 | 23359 | ||||
| 37 | 3082 | — | — | 11763 | ||||
| 38 | 363 | — | — | 13624 | ||||
| 39 | 314 | — | — | 9862 | ||||
| 1640 | 1450 | — | — | 12771 | ||||
| 41 | 1375 | — | — | 13142 | ||||
| 42 | 1274 | — | — | 13273 | ||||
| 43 | 996 | — | — | 13212 | ||||
| 44 | 1492 | — | — | 10933 | ||||
| 45 | 1871 | — | — | 11479 | ||||
| 46 | 2365 | — | — | 12780 | ||||
| 47 | 3597 | 1260 | 139 | 14059 | ||||
| 48 | 611 | 884 | 401 | 9894 | ||||
| 49 | 67 | 751 | 1190 | 10566 | ||||
| 1650 | 15 | 970 | 184 | 8754 | ||||
| 51 | 23 | 1038 | 525 | 10827 | ||||
| 52 | 16 | 1212 | 1279 | 12569 | ||||
| 53 | 6 | 282 | 139 | 10087 | ||||
| 54 | 16 | 1371 | 832 | 13247 | ||||
| 55 | 9 | 689 | 1294 | 11357 | ||||
| 56 | 6 | 875 | 823 | 13921 | ||||
| 57 | 4 | 999 | 835 | 12434 | ||||
| 58 | 14 | 1800 | 409 | 14993 | ||||
| 59 | 36 | 2303 | 1523 | 14756 | ||||
| 1660 | 13 | 2148 | 354 | 12681 | ||||
| 61 | 20 | 3490 | 1246 | 16665 | ||||
| 62 | 12 | 2601 | 768 | 13664 | ||||
| 63 | 9 | 2107 | 411 | 12741 | ||||
| 64 | 5 | 2258 | 1233 | 15453 | ||||
| 65 | 68596 | 5257 | 655 | 97306 | ||||
| 1666 | 1998 | 741 | 38 | 12738 |
The year 1638, and the four successive years 1640-43, have exceptional mortalities, which plague alone can by no means account for. In one of those years, 1641, we know that smallpox was rife, along with plague, in the autumn; in the third week of August there were 118 deaths from smallpox (133 from plague), and in the second week of September 101 from smallpox (185 from plague), the plague continuing at even higher figures all through September and October, while smallpox ceases to be mentioned in the letters of the time[1058]. According to earlier and later experience, the epidemic of smallpox would have been followed by a quiet interval of that disease; so that the high mortality, beyond what plague could account for, would have been due to some other epidemic type. There is little doubt that that type was fever, less heard of in letters of the society people because it was, in its steady prevalence from year to year, an infection of the crowded quarters of the poor.
We begin about this period to find fever, or typhus fever, taking that place in the medical history of England which it continued to hold down to the generation before our own. What remains of the history of plague until its extinction in 1665-66, is so closely interwoven with the history of malignant fever, that it will be more convenient to carry the latter on side by side with it instead of in a separate chapter.