1847
| Manchester (Ancoats) | Sheffield (West) | York (Walmgate) | Places in Scotland | |||||
| October | 169 | 27 | 61 | 521 | ||||
| November | 135 | 27 | 52 | 728 | ||||
| December | 270 | 85 | 99 | 1001 |
In some parts of England, as in Kendal, a district of Anglesea and in the Isle of Wight, the mortality of the last quarter of 1847 was actually lower than that of the year before. From St Albans the sub-registrar reported that there had been “no epidemic.” In most parts of the country, including the medium-sized towns, the mortality directly or indirectly due to influenza was lower than in London. The principal returns did not come in from the country until after the new year, the effects of the epidemic having been, as usual, later in rural districts. Hence, while London had 1253 deaths put down to “influenza” in 1847 (nearly all in December), and 659 in 1848 (nearly all in the first quarter), the rest of England had 4881 influenza deaths before the New Year, and 7963 after it[742]. This influenza in the mid-winter of 1847-8 made a great impression everywhere[743]. As regards its range and its fatality, it was like those of 1833 and 1837; and it had once more so much of the catarrhal type, that the name of influenza became still more firmly joined to the idea of a feverish cold or defluxion.
By the year 1847, agues had almost ceased to be written of in England, although they still occurred in the Fens. But Peacock begins his account of the influenza of that winter with an enumeration of prevailing diseases, which reads somewhat like an old “constitution” by Sydenham or Huxham. The summers and autumns of 1846 and 1847, he says, were both highly choleraic, and dysentery (as well as enteric fever) was unusually common in the former year. Fatal cases of “ague and remittent fever” were also more numerous than usual. Then came much enteric fever, “not unfrequently complicated with catarrhal symptoms.” Throughout the spring and early summer of the influenza year, 1847, “intermittent fevers were common, and in March, April and May, purpura was frequently met with, either as a primary or secondary disease. Scurvy also, owing to the deficiency of fresh vegetables, and from the general failure of the potato crop in the previous year was occasionally seen.” Then follows much concerning a fever called remittent, which reads more like relapsing fever than anything else[744]. “The remittent form of fever was frequent in the course of the epidemic [of influenza], though seldom registered as the cause of death.” Peacock says truly that the rather unusual concurrence of so many sicknesses was “not peculiar to the recent influenza alone;” and he can “scarcely refrain from acknowledging that these several affections are not merely coetaneous but correlative, and types and modifications of one disease, with which they have a common origin. Assuming this inference to be admitted, we may advance to the solution of the further question of what is the essential nature or proximate cause of the disease.” But the inquiry led him to no result: the precise cause he leaves “involved in the obscurity that veils the origin of epidemics generally”—which are surely not all equally obscure[745].
Influenza having continued epidemic for a few weeks in the beginning of 1848, ceased thereafter to attract popular notice in Britain during a period of more than forty years. But a certain number of “influenza” deaths continued to appear steadily year after year in the registration tables. In 1851 this number was nearly doubled, in 1855 it was more than trebled; and those two years were undoubtedly seasons (about January and February) of real influenza epidemics in Europe, recorded by several but not by English writers. A slight epidemic was described for Scotland in 1857, and one for Norfolk in 1878, neither of which seems to have influenced the registration returns in an obvious degree. After the undoubted influenza of 1855, the annual total of deaths in England set down to that cause steadily declined from four figures, to three figures, and then to two figures, standing at 55 in the bill of mortality for 1889. It is improbable that those small annual totals of deaths in all England and Wales were caused by the real influenza; the name at that time was synonymous with a feverish cold, and would have been given here or there to fatalities from some such ordinary cause. An epidemic ague was reported from Somerset in 1858[746].
The Influenzas of 1889-94.
More than a generation had passed with little or no word of epidemic influenza in this country, when in the early winter of 1889 the newspapers began to publish long telegrams on the influenza in Moscow, St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Madrid and other foreign capitals. This epidemic wave, like those immediately preceding it in the Eastern hemisphere, in 1833, 1837 and 1847, and like one or more, but by no means all, of the earlier influenzas, had an obvious course from Asiatic and European Russia towards Western Europe[747]. In due time it reached London, and produced a decided effect upon the bills of mortality for the first and second weeks of January, 1890, but a moderate effect compared with that of 1847, which was the first to be recorded under the same system of registration. It spread all over England, Scotland and Ireland in the months of January and February, 1890, proving itself everywhere a short and sharp influenza of the old kind, but with catarrhal symptoms on the whole a less constant feature than in the epidemics of most recent memory. At the end of February it looked as if Great Britain and Ireland had got off lightly from the visitation which had caused high mortalities in many countries of Continental Europe. But this epidemic in the beginning of 1890 was only the first of four, and less severe than the second and third. It returned in the spring and early summer of 1891, in the first weeks of 1892, and in the winter of 1893-94. To understand this influenza prevalence as a whole, its four great seasons should be compared. The following tables show its incidence upon London on each occasion: