“About thirty-seven years since [written in 1732], this fever raged much in Bristol, so that I visited from twenty-five to thirty patients a day for a considerable time, besides their poor children taken into their workhouse, where I engaged myself, for the encouragement of so good and charitable an undertaking, to find them physick and give them advice at my own expense and trouble for the two first years. All these poor children in general had this fever, yet no more than one of them died of it of the whole number, which was near two hundred.”
—an experience of typhus in children which was strictly according to rule. This had clearly been the occasion of a memorial addressed to the Mayor and Aldermen of Bristol, in 1696, praying that a capacious workhouse should be erected for children and the aged, which “will prevent children from being smothered or starved by the neglect of the parish officers and poverty of their parents, which is now a great loss to the nation[68].”
The year 1698 was the climax of the seven ill years. The spring was the most backward for forty-seven years, the first wheat in the ear being seen near London on 16th June. For four months to the end of August the days were almost all rainy, except from the 18th to the 26th July. Whole fields of corn were spoilt. In Kent there was barley standing uncut on 29th September, and some lay in the swathe until December. Much of the corn in the north of England was not got in until Christmas, and in Scotland they were reaping the green empty corn in January[69].
Fevers of the seven ill years in Scotland.
It is from Scotland that we hear most of the effects of the seven ill years in the way of famine and fever. Scotland was then in a backward state compared with England; and its northern climate, making the harvest always a few weeks later than in England, told especially against it in the ill years. Fynes Morryson, in the beginning of the 17th century, contrasts the Scotch manner of life unfavourably with the English, and Sir Robert Sibbald’s account towards the end of that century is little better. Morryson says, “the excesse of drinking was then farre greater in generall among the Scots than the English.” Sibbald remarks[70] on the drinking habits of the Scots common people: their potations of ale or spirits on an empty stomach, especially in the morning, relaxed the fibres and induced “erratic fevers of a bad type, bastard pleurisies, ... dropsies, stupors, lethargies and apoplexies.” Morryson says: “Their bedsteads were then like cubbards in the wall, with doores to be opened and shut at pleasure, so as we climbed up to our beds. They used but one sheete, open at the sides and top, but close at the feete, and so doubled[71].” Sibbald says the peasantry had poor food and hard work, and were subject to many diseases—“heartburn, sleeplessness, ravings, hypochondriac affections, mania, dysentery, scrophula, cancer, and a dire troop of diseases which everywhere now invades the husbandmen that were formerly free from diseases.” Causa a victu est. Therefore consumption was common enough. He has much to say of fevers,—of intermittents, especially in spring and autumn, catarrhal fevers, nervous fevers, comatose fevers, with delirium, spasms and the like symptoms, malignant, spotted, pestilential, hectic, &c. The continued fevers ranged in duration from fifteen to thirty-one days, recovery being ushered in with sweats, alvine flux and salivation. Purple fevers had sometimes livid or black spots mixed with the purple (mottling); in a case given, there were suppurations which appear to have been bubonic. There had been no plague in Scotland since 1647-48; but fevers, unless Sibbald has given undue prominence to them, would appear to have filled its place among the adults.
Another writer of this period, from whom some information is got as to fevers, was Dr Andrew Brown of Edinburgh. He is mainly a controversialist, and is on the whole of little use save for the history of the treatment of fevers. He came to London on a visit in 1687, attracted by the fame of Sydenham’s method of curing fevers by antimonial emetics and by purgation: “Returning home as much overjoyed as I had gotten a treasure, I presently set myself to that practice”—of which he gave an account in his ‘Vindicatory Schedule concerning the New Cure of Fever[72].’ Continual fever, he says, takes up, with its pendicles, the half of all the diseases that men are afflicted with; and some part of what he calls continual fever must have been spotted: “As concerning the eruption of spots in fevers, these altogether resemble the marks made by stroaks on the skin, and these marks are also made by the stagnation and coagulation of the blood in the small channels [according to the doctrine of obstructions].... They tinge the skin with blewness or redness.”
The bitter controversy as to the treatment of fevers led Brown into another writing in 1699[73].
“The fevers that reign at this time [it was towards the end of the seven ill years] are for the most part quick and peracute, and cut off in a few days persons of impure bodies. And as I have used this method by vomiting and purging in many, and most successfully at this time, so I have had lately considerable experience thereof in my own family: wherein four of my children and ten servants had the fever, and blessed be God, are all recovered, by repeated vomiting with antimonial vomits and frequent purgings, except two servants, the one having gotten a great stress at work, who bragging of his strength did contend with his neighbour at the mowing of hay, and presently sickened and died the sixth day, and whom I saw not till the day before he died, and found him in such a condition that I could not give him either vomit or purge: and the other was his neighbour who strove with him, being a man of most impure and emaciate body, who had endured want and stress before he came to my service, and who got not all was necessary because he had not the occasion of due attendance, all my servants being sick at the time[74].”
This account of the experience which Dr Andrew Brown had lately had among his children and domestics in or near Edinburgh was written in 1699, and may be taken as relating to part of the wide-spread sickliness of the seven ill years in Scotland. Fletcher of Saltoun gives us a general view of the deplorable state of Scotland at the end of the 17th century, which was intensified by the succession of bad harvests[75]. The rents of cultivated farms were paid, not in money, but in corn, which gave occasion to many inequalities, to the traditional fraudulent practices of millers and to usury. The pasture lands for sheep and black cattle had no shelters from the weather, and no winter provision of hay or straw (roots were unheard of until long after), “so that the beasts are in a dying condition.” The country swarmed with vagrants (a hundred thousand, he estimates, in ordinary times, but doubled in the dear years), who lived and multiplied in incest, rioted in swarms in the nearest hills in times of plenty, and in times of distress fell upon farmhouses in gangs of forty or more, demanding food. Besides these there were a great many poor families very meanly provided for by the Church boxes, who lived wholly upon bad food and fell into various diseases. He had been credibly informed that some families in the years of mere scarcity preceding the climax of 1698-99 had eaten grains, for want of bread. “In the worst time, from unwholesome food diseases are so multiplied among poor people that, if some course be not taken, the famine may very probably be followed by a plague[76].”
We owe some details of these calamities in Scotland to Patrick Walker, the Covenanter, who records them to show how the prophecies of Divine vengeance on the land, uttered during the Stuart persecutions by Cargill and Peden, had been in due time fulfilled[77]: