[117] “Je crois qu’ils ont voulu indiquer l’ignis sacer ou de St Antoine, qui dans ces années et surtout 1044 sévit en France.” Recherches de Pathologie Comparée, vol. II. p. cxlviii.
[118] On the other hand, Short, in his General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc. (2 vols. London, 1749) says that the epidemic of 1110 consisted of “especially an epidemic erysipelas, whereof many died, the parts being black and shrivelled up;” and that in 1128, “St Anthony’s fire was fatal to many in England.” He gives no authority in either case. But the one error is run to earth in a French entry of 1109, “membris instar carbonum nigrescentibus” (Sig. Gembl. auctar. p. 274, Migne); the other, most likely, in the ignis around Chartres, 1128 (Stephen of Caen, Bouquet, xii. 780).
Perhaps this is the best place to express a general opinion on the work by Short, which is the only book of the kind in English previous to my own. It is everywhere uncritical and credulous, and often grossly inaccurate in dates, sometimes repeating the same epidemic under different years. It appears to have been compiled, for the earlier part, at least, from foreign sources, such as a Chronicle of Magdeburg, and to a large extent from a work by Colle de Belluno (fl. 1631). Many of the facts about English epidemics are given almost as in the original chronicles, but without reference to them. English experience of sickness is lost in the general chronology of epidemics for all Europe, and is dealt with in a purely verbalist manner. So far as this volume extends (1667) I have found Short’s book of no use, except now and then in calling my attention to something that I had overlooked. His other work, New Observations on City, Town and County Bills of Mortality (London, 1750) shows the author to much greater advantage, and I have used his statistical tables for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[119] The facts were communicated to the Royal Society by Charlton Wollaston, M.D., F.R.S., then resident in Suffolk, and by the Rev. James Bones. They were referred by Dr G. Baker to Tissot of Lausanne, who replied that they corresponded to typical gangrenous ergotism. See Phil. Trans. vol. LII. pt. 2 (1762) p. 523, p. 526, p. 529; and vol. LX. (1768) p. 106.
[120] An erroneous statement as to an epidemic of gangrenous ergotism, or of Kriebelkrankheit, in England in 1676, has somehow come to be current in German books. It has a place in the latest chronological table of ergotism epidemics, that of Hirsch in his Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie, vol. II. 1883 (Engl. Transl. II. p. 206), the reference being to Birch, Philos. Transact. This reference to ergotism in England in 1676 is given also in Th. O. Heusinger’s table (1856), where it appears in the form of “Schnurrer, nach Birch.” On turning to Schnurrer’s Chronik der Seuchen (II. 210), the reference is found to be, “Birch, Phil. Trans. vols. XI. and XII.”; and coming at length to the Philosophical Transactions, it appears that vols. X., XI. and XII. are bound up together, that vol. XII. (1676) p. 758, contains an extract from the Journal des Sçavans about ergot of rye in certain parts of France, and that there is nothing about ergotism in England in either vol. XI. or vol. XII. So far as concerns Dr Birch, he was secretary to the Royal Society in the next century.
[121] Knighton, De Eventibus Angliae in Twysden, col. 2580: “In aestate scilicet anno Gratiae 1340 accidit quaedam execrabilis et enormis infirmitas in Anglia quasi communis, et praecipue in comitatu Leicestriae adeo quod durante passione homines emiserunt vocem latrabilem ac si esset latratus canum; et fuit quasi intolerabilis poena durante passione: ex inde fuit magna pestilentia hominum.”
[122] Phil. Trans. XXIII. p. 1174 (June 26, 1702).
[123] Op. cit. I. pt. 2, p. 366.
[124] Phil. Trans. XXII. (1700-1701), p. 799, a Letter in Latin from Joh. Freind dated Christ Church, Oxford, 31 March.
[125] The earliest religious hysterias of Sweden fall in the years 1668 to 1673, which do not correspond to years of ergotism in that country, although there was ergotism in France in 1670 and in Westphalia in 1672. The later Swedish psychopathies have been in 1841-2, 1854, 1858, and 1866-68, some of which years do correspond closely to periods of ergotism in Sweden.