Periods as unhealthy as 1657-59 do not occur again until 1667-71, and 1679-84.
Willis says, of the autumnal epidemic of 1658: “But in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick.” That is confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: “A world of sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the wholesomest place;” but on January 4, 1659: “There is much sickness in the town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox[1119].” In Short’s tables, the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in 1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes.
A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. The largest number of deaths from fever was in the year of the plague itself, when the bills of mortality returned them as 5257 (without much certainty, however, owing to the confusion of the plague). The next highest figures had been in 1661, when the fever deaths were 3490. We get a glimpse of that epidemic from Pepys; on August 16, 1661, he writes: “But it is such a sickly time both in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was heard of almost, unless it was in plague-time. Among others, the famous Tom Fuller is dead of it, and Dr Nicholls [Nicholas], dean of St Paul’s, and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill.” On August 31 he enters in his diary: “The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal fevers.” The same diarist, on October 20, 1663, has an entry that the queen is ill of a spotted fever and that “she is as full of spots as a leopard;” on the 24th the queen was in a good way to recovery.
It is at this period that Sydenham’s famous observations of the seasons and the public health in London begin. The autumnal intermittents, he says, which had been prevalent some years before, came back in 1661 with new strength, about the beginning of July, being mostly tertians of a bad type: they increased so much in August as to sweep away families almost entirely, but declined with the winter cold coming on. He then draws the distinction between them and ordinary tertians. In the same years, 1661-2-3-4, a continued fever is described at great length, and then he comes to the “pestilential fever” and the plague itself of 1665 and 1666[1120]. Taking from Sydenham the single fact, for the present, that an unusual amount of pestilential fever led up to the plague of 1665 (which he did not stay in London to witness), we shall proceed in the next chapter but one to that crowning epidemic of the present section of our history. Something more remains to be said of the fevers of 1661 (specially described by Willis as a fever of the brain and nervous stock, but called “the new disease” in its turn); but as it is the first of Sydenham’s “epidemic constitutions,” and as these are recorded continuously to 1685, when there was another “new fever,” it will be convenient to end the detailed history of fevers for the present with the remarkable epidemics of 1657-59.
CHAPTER XI.
SICKNESSES OF VOYAGES AND COLONIES.
(Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.)
The sicknesses of the first voyages and foreign settlements come into the history of national maladies, both as concerning Britain on the sea and beyond sea, and as showing forth the disease-producing conditions of those early times. In the latter respect there is more to be learned from voyages and colonial experience than the records of domestic life at home are likely to inform us of otherwise than vaguely. The Englishman of the time carried his habits with him to sea and to foreign parts, where the circumstances were more trying and the consequences more obvious.