From 1803 to 1831, nothing is heard in England of a universal influenza, although there was one such in the end of 1805 and beginning of 1806 in Russia, Germany, France and Italy; and there were four great influenzas in the Western Hemisphere (1807, 1815-16, 1824-25, and 1826). Catarrhs were perhaps commoner than usual in England and Scotland in the winter of 1807-8, but they cannot be reckoned an epidemic of influenza[705]. The summer following (1808) was unusually hot and agues became more epidemic in the fens than at any time since the great aguish period of 1780 and following years[706]. Agues were again unusually rife in England in 1826, 1827 and 1828, at the same time as the remarkable epidemics of them, from inundations and subsequent drought, in Holland and along the German coast of the North Sea. Dr John Elliotson, of London, met with cases of agues in his practice in those years in the following scale:
| Year | Cases | |
| 1823 | 8 | |
| 1824 | 14 | |
| 1825 | 15 | |
| 1826 | 44 | |
| 1827 | 53 | |
| 1828 | 27 | |
| 1829 | 8 |
They had increased, he says, throughout the country as well as in London, owing, as he thought, in agreement with Macmichael, to the higher mean temperature of the respective years; and he would apply the same law of increase to the epidemic periods of ague in Britain in former times[707]. Christison saw his first case of ague at Edinburgh in the autumn of 1827, in a labourer who had caught it working at the harvest in the fen-country of Lincolnshire.
The Influenza of 1831.
The next influenza in Britain fell in the early summer of 1831. It was a mild epidemic of the catarrhal type, which attracted hardly any notice in England. In one of the London medical journals there is no other notice of it but this, dated 2 July, 1831[708]: “In consequence of the sudden variations of temperature which have prevailed since the last fortnight of May an epidemic bronchitis has shown itself in Paris.” Another London journal[709], on the very same day, wrote: “Influenza in a severe form is at present prevailing in London and some of the provincial towns. It commences like a common cold, but is soon discovered to be more serious, &c.” The physician to the public dispensary in Chancery Lane found that more than half of the seventy applicants on 23 June came with the symptoms of influenza—severe, harsh, dry cough, in paroxysms, pain behind the sternum, a fixed pain in one side, congested state of the throat, nose and eyes, heaviness of the head, languor, debility, hot skin, foul tongue, impaired sense of taste. The symptoms went off after three or four days with a sweat in the night and a discharge from the nostrils[710].
This epidemic hardly affected the London bills of mortality, according to the following figures:
| Four weeks, 25 May to 21 June, | 1579 births, 1430 deaths. |
| Five weeks, 22 June to 26 July, | 2153 births, 2010 deaths. |
| Four weeks, 27 July to 23 Aug., | 1997 births, 1652 deaths. |
The rise in the last four weeks was due to summer diarrhoea, or choleraic diarrhoea, which was unusually common in 1831. This slight influenza was also reported from Plymouth by a surgeon who had seen the disease, and suffered from it, at Manilla in September, 1830[711], and by a Plymouth practitioner, who wrote, on 14 July, that it had been extensively prevalent there and in the neighbouring towns and villages[712]. It is recorded also from the Isle of Man, Glasgow[713], and Ayr[714], and it is supposed to have been in Aberdeen[715]. But, while there are many accounts of this epidemic in Germany in May and June, and undoubted evidence of it in France and Italy, as well as in Sweden, and in Poland and Russia earlier in the year, the accounts of it in Britain are so meagre and casual as to make one doubt whether it really was an influenza worth reckoning.