Letters of 1658 from London bear out the prevalence of autumnal sickness. On August 3, one writes that the weather is hot and dry, the town extremely empty, and the flux beginning. On January 4, 1659, there is much sickness, especially fevers, agues and the smallpox.
A good deal of the interest of Whitmore’s essay lies in his arguments against blood letting in this fever; but that is part of a history which will have to be dealt with as a whole at a later stage.
Whitmore then proceeds to the vernal epidemic of 1659, just as Willis had done to that of 1658. His words are (4 Nov. 1659):
“Having given an account of the nature and cure of this disease which now rageth throughout England, I shall briefly describe that which this spring universally infested London; and show how it agreed and how it differed from that disease which last fall invaded the whole nation.” He then describes the typical influenza, just as Willis had done under a date a year earlier—pains in the limbs of some, coughs, and aguish distempers in others; “so that in a week or a fortnight’s time, when it had fermented and caused a putrefaction of humours, it quickly tended to a height, and struck many thousands in London down, scarce leaving a family where any store were, without some being ill of this distemper, suddenly sweeping very many away, being the same, in the judgment of no mean physician, with that in autumn last, though in a new skin.” Whitmore then gives a reason “why this should hold them all with coughs, which it did not in the fall.”
Assuming an affinity to the autumnal epidemic of 1658, he proceeds to state the circumstance of a reappearance in the spring of 1659: “Upon this hush it lay all the winter, until the Easter week, and then in two or three warm days broke loose, having had no warm weather all before, but a rainy and black week, the sun not appearing for five or six days together just before the holiday; when on a sudden that warm weather breaking forth, the citizens in their summer pomp, being thinner clothed many of them than before (like bees on a glorious day) swarmed abroad, and the pores etc.”
Both Willis and Whitmore incline to the view that the catarrhal fever of the spring was akin to the strange fever of the autumn, the differentia of each being appropriate to the season. Willis, however, keeps the two types more apart than Whitmore. The latter speaks of both fevers as “this Protean-like distemper,” whose various shapes “render it such a hocus pocus to the amazed and perplexed people, they being held after most strange and diverse ways with it.” It is “so prodigious in its alterations that it seems to outvie even Proteus himself.” Thus the strangest part of these narratives is not the catarrhal influenza, which has so often reappeared as to be familiar, but the prevalence of anomalous fevers, in some respects like intermittents without the clear interval between the fits, but in respect of contagion, spots, pains and other symptoms, like typhus—a volatile typhus of the country and of the towns. Although this epidemiological phenomenon be a strange one, there is no reason to question the correctness of Willis’s observations, corroborated as they are by those of Whitmore. But there are, indeed, many more experiences of the like kind in the years to follow, which fall without the limits of the present volume. One only of these later observers need be mentioned here. The third of the famous trio with Sydenham and Willis was Morton. He had a long experience in London of fever and smallpox, which he made the subject of a book in 1692-4[1117]. His history goes as far back as 1658—“historia febris συνεχὴς ab anno 1658 ad annum 1691.” Of the year 1658 he says the fever was everywhere through England and refers to Willis; the only facts of his own being that Oliver Cromwell and his (Morton’s) father were carried off by it in September of that year, that he had it himself (aged 20) and was three months in recovering, and that the whole household (in Suffolk) were infected. Cromwell’s attack came upon him at Hampton Court on August 21; but it was not the first sickness of the kind that he had suffered. He was only fifty-nine, but worn out with many cares, and at that time distressed by the death of his favourite daughter, Lady Claypole, under his roof on August 6, from some painful internal female trouble. The Lord Protector’s fever was called a “bastard tertian,” which might have been a name for the fever described by Willis. He was removed on the 24th August to Whitehall, where the air was thought to be more wholesome; and died between three and four in the afternoon of September 3, the anniversary at once of “Dunbar field and Worcester’s laureat wreath.”
This prevalence of fevers, Protean in their varying types, all over England in 1657-59 corresponds to the fever period of 1623-24. In each case the fever was a minor plague, and in each case it was followed by a revival of the plague proper, which had been dormant all over the country for a dozen or fifteen years. The principal difference is that the fever-period of 1623-24 was followed by the plague in 1625, whereas the fever-period of 1657-59 was followed by several years not free from fever and then by the plague in 1665. It is clear that the fevers of 1657-59 made a great impression all over England, and were afterwards popularly spoken of as a warning of the Great Plague itself. In the parish register of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, there is inserted a poem on the Great Plague of 1665, which has the following verses[1118]:
“Seven years since a little plague God sent,
He shook his rod to move us to repent.
Not long before that time a dearth of corn
Was sent to us to see if we would turn.”
In Short’s abstracts of parish registers, the years preceding 1665 stand out as sickly in country districts, according to the following figures:
| No. of registers examined | No. with sickness | Baptisms in same | Burials in same | |||||
| 1657 | 98 | 36 | 991 | 1305 | ||||
| 1658 | 96 | 33 | 704 | 1159 | ||||
| 1659 | 101 | 29 | 553 | 825 | ||||
| 1660 | 107 | 17 | 342 | 489 | ||||
| 1661 | 182(?) | 25 | 448 | 685 | ||||
| 1662 | 105 | 20 | 376 | 504 | ||||
| 1663 | 119 | 15 | 325 | 443 | ||||
| 1664 | 118 | 12 | 328 | 364 | ||||
| 1665 | 117 | 14 | 229 | 446 |