Males Females Total
January 111 118 229
February 37 62 99
March 9 20 29
157 200 357

But the heading of “influenza” did not nearly show the full effects of the epidemic upon the mortality, which was enormous in Glasgow in January, as compared with the same month of 1836:

All causesCatarrhAgedAsthmaFeverDecline
Jan. 18367904733145124
Jan. 18371972229274185201247

There was also a great increase in the deaths of infants by bowel complaint. The only period of life which did not show a great rise of mortality was from five to twenty; the greatest rise was between the ages of forty and seventy, corresponding to the London experience in the epidemic of 1847.

At Bolton, Lancashire, the great rise in the deaths, as compared with the average of five years before, was in February:

Average of
five years
1831-36		 1837
January 111·2 115
February 79·0 205
March 97·8 100
288·0 420

At Exeter, the burials in the two chief graveyards were 227 in January and February, 1837, as compared with 125 in the same months of 1836. These mortalities, although large, were but a small ratio of the attacks. In 2347 cases enumerated in the collective inquiry, there were 54 deaths, a ratio of two deaths in a hundred cases being considered a full average. The attacks were mostly in middle life, and the deaths nearly all among the asthmatic, the consumptive and the aged. The ages of one hundred persons attacked at Birmingham were as follows[730]:

Ages 1- 5- 10- 20- 30- 40- 50- 60- 70- 80-90
Cases 3 2 12 23 21 19 12 7 0 1

At Evesham only five out of 93 were under five years. At Leamington, in a list of 170 cases, there were 26 under fourteen years, 119 from fourteen to sixty-five years, and 25 above the age of sixty-five[731]. In some places males seemed to be most attacked, just as at Birmingham in 1833 there was a great excess of female cases; but the collective inquiry showed that the sexes shared about equally all over. The type of the malady was on the whole catarrhal, as in 1833. Nearly all the cases had symptoms of sneezing, coughing, and defluxions; many cases had nothing more than the symptoms of a severe feverish cold; the more dangerous cases had dyspnoea, pneumonia and the like; while all had the languor, weariness, and soreness in the bones which mark every influenza, whether it incline more to the moist type of catarrhal fever or to the dry type of the old “hot ague.”

The influenza of 1837 having been remarkably simultaneous, sudden and brief, the doctrine of personal contagiousness found little favour, just as in 1833. The 12th query sent out by the committee of the Provincial Medical Association was: “Are you in possession of any proof of its having been communicated from one person to another?” The answers are said to have been nearly all negative; namely, that there was “no proof of the existence of any contagious principles by which it was propagated from one individual to another.” Shapter, a learned physician at Exeter, inclined to a certain modified doctrine of contagion by persons. Blakiston, of Birmingham, an exact mathematician, declared that the question as ordinarily stated did not admit of an answer.