| Week ending 9 Nov. | Week ending 16 Nov. | |||
| Consumption | 68 | 99 | ||
| Aged | 40 | 67 | ||
| Tissick | 10 | 35 |
Sydenham’s account bears out the figures[586]. At the end of October, he says, the mild, warm weather turned to cold, while catarrhs and coughs became more frequent than at any time within his memory. They lasted until the end of November, when they ceased suddenly. Afterwards he gives a special chapter to the “Epidemic Coughs of the year 1675, with Pleurisies and Pneumonias supervening.” The epidemic spared, he says, hardly anyone of whatever age or temperament; it went through whole families at once. A fever which he calls febris comatosa had been raging far and wide since the beginning of July, with which in the autumn dysenteric and diarrhoeal disorders were mingled (it was an exceedingly dry season). This constitution held the mastery all the autumn, affecting now the head, now the bowels, until the end of October, when catarrhs and coughs became universal and continued for a month. Sydenham’s view of the sequence of events was his usual one, namely, that one constitution, by change of season, passed by transition into another. Whatever the constitution of “comatose” fevers may have been, which prevailed “far and near,” it has left no trace upon the bills of mortality in London, which are remarkably low until the beginning of November. But as soon as the epidemic of coughs begins, the weekly deaths mount up in an unmistakeable manner, so that for two or three weeks in November, the mortality is nearly double that of the weeks preceding or following.
The “severe cold and violent cough,” of 1675, says Thoresby of Leeds[587], who was then a boy, “too young or unobservant to make such remarks as might be of use,” was known in the north of England “profanely” by the name of the “jolly rant.” Thoresby well remembered that it affected all manner of persons, and that so universally that it was impossible, owing to the coughing, to hear distinctly an entire sentence of a sermon. He gives December as the month of it in Leeds, and says that it affected York, Hull, and Halifax, as well as the counties of Westmoreland, Durham, and Northumberland. In Scotland also we find a trace of a strange epidemic sickness. It was the time of the persecution of the Covenanters, whose preachers moved hither and thither among the farm-houses. One of them, John Blackadder, was at the Cow-hill in the parish of Livingstown in August, 1675. He came in one evening from the fields very melancholy, and in reply to questions, he said he was afraid of a very dangerous infectious mist to go through the land that night. He desired the family to close doors and windows, and keep them closed as long as they might, and to take notice where the mist stood thickest and longest, for there they would see the effects saddest. “And it remained longest upon that town called the Craigs, being within their sight, and only a few families; and within four months thereafter, thirty corpses went out of that place[588].” The prophecy was fulfilled within four months, which would bring us to the date of the influenza, although the mortality for a small place is somewhat excessive.
The Influenza of 1679.
For the sake of comparison, I pass at once to an epidemic of coughs and colds in the month of November, 1679, which Sydenham has chronicled, but no one except Cullen[589] has thought of including among the influenzas. It produced the characteristic effect of influenza on the London weekly bills, and it came in the midst of epidemic agues, just as the epidemic catarrhs of 1658 and 1659 had done. The following rise and fall are just as distinctive of an influenza as on the last occasion in 1675:
1679
| Week Ending | Fever | Smallpox | Griping of the Guts | All causes | |||||
| Nov. | 11 | 50 | 18 | 34 | 328 | ||||
| 18 | 89 | 27 | 39 | 541 | |||||
| 25 | 126 | 21 | 55 | 764 | |||||
| Dec. | 2 | 82 | 27 | 38 | 457 | ||||
| 9 | 63 | 12 | 38 | 388 | |||||
Sydenham’s account[590] of this remarkable November outburst of sickness in London, written within a few weeks of its occurrence, is almost exactly a repetition of his language concerning the epidemic coughs of November, 1675. The prevailing intermittent fevers, he says, gave place to a new epidemic depending upon a manifest crasis of the air. The new epidemic was one of coughs, which were so much more general than at the same season in other years that in nearly every family they affected nearly every person. In some cases of the cough, the aid of a physician was hardly needed; but in others the chest was so shaken by the violent convulsive cough as to bring on vomiting, and the head was affected with vertigo. For the first few days the cough was almost dry, and so purely paroxysmal as to remind Sydenham of the whooping-cough of children. Everyone was surprised, he says, at the frequency of these coughs in this season. His own suggestion was that the rains of October[591] had filled the blood with crude and watery particles, that the first access of cold had checked transpiration through the skin, and that Nature had contrived to eliminate this serous colluvies either by the branches of the “vena arteriosa” or (as some will have it) by the glands of the trachea, and to explode it by the aid of a cough. Phlebotomy and purging were the best cures; diaphoretics he considered less safe, and he ascribed to their abuse the fever into which some fell, and the pleurisies which were apt to attack patients with great violence during the subsidence of the epidemic catarrh.