The number of those that recovered of the smallpox
(including four that were inoculated)		 608
Died of it 97
Escaped it 206
Died of other diseases since the smallpox raged there 50
The whole number of inhabitants in that town are 1636

Leaving out the fifty who died of other diseases as persons who may or may not have had smallpox, it appears that 725 of the inhabitants of Hastings had been through the smallpox in previous epidemics, that 705 were attacked in this epidemic, and that 206 had hitherto escaped, some of them to be attacked, doubtless, in the future. The proportion of attacks above the age of childhood in the epidemic of 1730-31 would have depended on the length of time since the last great epidemic; the interval was probably a long one, by the large number of susceptible persons in the town, just as at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1721 and 1752, and at Charleston, Carolina, in 1738[998]; and, as the fact is known for these places, so it is probable that the epidemic at Hastings had included many adolescents and adults.

On the other hand, where smallpox came in epidemics at short intervals, or where it was always present, the incidence, even in the first half of the 18th century, was much more exclusively upon childhood. Thus at Nottingham there was always some smallpox, with a great outburst perhaps once in five years. The year 1736 was one of those fatal periods of smallpox, the victims being “mostly children.” From the end of May to the beginning of September, great numbers were swept away; the burials in St Mary’s churchyard were 104 in May; the burials from all causes for the whole year exceeded the baptisms by 380; there had been no such mortality since thirty years. Such excessive incidence of smallpox upon the earliest years of life happened in places where the infant mortality was high from all causes. Nottingham was one of those places. Leaving out the great smallpox year, 1736, the other seven years of the period 1732-39 had a total of 2590 baptisms to 2226 burials, of which burials no fewer than 1072 were of “infants,” meaning probably children under five years, although the work of Harris on the Acute Diseases of Infants, which was current at that time, defines the infantine age as under four years[999].

The years of distress and typhus fever in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1740 to 1742 were another great period of smallpox epidemics throughout the country. The mortality from that cause is known to have been excessive in Norwich, Blandford, Edinburgh and Kilmarnock, which may be taken as samples of a larger number of epidemics in the same years. The association of much smallpox of a fatal type with much typhus fever, which can be traced in the London bills from an early period, is at length seen to be the rule for the country at large. After 1740-42, the next instances of it were in 1756 and 1766: it is most definitely indicated again in 1798-1800, very clearly in 1817-19, and in 1837-39. In all the later instances smallpox was the peculiar scourge of the infants and children in times of distress, while the contagious fever was as distinctively fatal to the higher ages. There is some reason to think that the law of incidence was the same in populous cities in 1740-42.

Thus at Edinburgh there died in the two worst years of the distress (population in 1732 estimated at 32,000)[1000]:

Edinburgh Mortalities.

1740 1741
Under two years 439 562
From two to five 198 269
From five to ten 53 93
Above ten 547 687
1237 1611
Fever 161 304
Flux 3 36
Consumption 278 349
Aged 102 156
Suddenly 56 62
{
{
{
{		Smallpox 274 206
Measles 100 112
Chincough 26 101
Convulsions 22 16
Teething 111 141
Stillborn 29 50
Other diseases 77 78

More than half the deaths were under five years, and among those deaths it will be necessary to include most of the smallpox mortality. That disease in the two exceptional years made 17 per cent. of all deaths, or one in six. But in its somewhat steady prevalence among children in Edinburgh from year to year, smallpox accounted for one death in about ten, as in the following[1001]:

Deaths by Smallpox and all causes in Edinburgh, including St Cuthbert’s parish, 1744-63.