Ages at deaths from all diseases.
| All deaths | Under One | One to Two | Two to Five | Five to Ten | Ten to Forty | Forty to Seventy | Above Seventy | |||||||||
| 1764-73 | 100 | 9 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 19 | 28 | 39 | ||||||||
| 1774-83 | 100 | 16 | 7 | 2 | 2 | 8 | 34 | 31 | ||||||||
| 1784-90 | 80 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 12 | 23 | 30 |
Twelve of the fourteen smallpox deaths occurred after the introduction of inoculation in 1776, and were ascribed by the parish minister to that source. Again, in the parish of Whittinghame, among the Lammermuir hills, “it is not remembered that this parish has ever been visited with any epidemical distemper”—its vital statistics for ten years, 1781-90, being (II. 352):
| Marriages | Baptisms | Burials | ||
| 54 | 189 | 81 |
On the other hand another Berwickshire parish, Dunse, much more populous and occupied with weaving, had an epidemic of smallpox in 1781, which brought the annual deaths up to 85, the births for the year being 54.
Authentic accounts of smallpox in Ireland in the 18th century are not easy to find, but it is clear from such notices of it as do exist that it could be widely prevalent and malignant in type. Rogers gives it a bad name in Cork in the first third of the century. During the great famine and fever of 1740-41 the deaths by smallpox are said to have been twice or thrice as many in Dublin as the deaths by fever[1028]. The smallpox mortality, being chiefly of infants and children, attracted no special notice, just as the smallpox deaths in the famine of 1817-18, although more than those by fever, are all but unmentioned in the various accounts for those years. Rutty, of Dublin, under the year 1745, says: “The smallpox was brought to us by a conflux of beggars from the north, occasioned by the late scarcity there; whose children, full of the smallpox, were frequently exposed in our streets.” His next mention of smallpox is in the winter of 1757-58, when the disease “kept pace in malignity,” with the prevalent spotted or typhus fever. Amidst numerous entries of fevers of all kinds (typhus, agues, miliary fevers), as well as scarlatina and angina, these are the only two references to smallpox in Rutty’s Dublin annals from 1726 to 1766. The annals kept by Sims of Tyrone overlap those of Rutty by a few years; and his first reference to smallpox is under the year 1766, which was a year of almost universal smallpox in England. Towards the close of 1766 and in the spring of 1767 the smallpox caused unheard-of havoc, scarcely one-half of all that were attacked escaping death. The disease had appeared the year before along the eastern coast, and proceeded slowly westward with so even a pace that a curious person might with ease have computed the rate of its progress. It had not visited the country for some years, and was not seen again until 1770, when it was less severe than in 1766-7[1029].
Little is heard of smallpox in the army and navy in the 18th century. Pringle says, “We have never known it of any consequence in the field.” On board ships of war it is mentioned occasionally, but very rarely in comparison with fever. Lind says that it prevailed in 1758 in the ‘Royal George,’ among a ship’s company of 880 men: “it destroyed four or five persons and left nearly a hundred unattacked[1030].” Trotter has an occasional reference to it in his naval annals from 1794 to 1797[1031]. One reason, and doubtless the chief reason, for its rarity in the services was that comparatively few escaped having it in childhood. The surgeon to the Cheshire Militia told Haygarth in 1781 that he found the whole regiment of six hundred to have had smallpox, except thirty[1032]. It does not appear that so great a ratio of sailors or marines were protected by a previous attack; for Trotter counted 70 in a 74-gun ship of war who had not had it, and based a calculation thereon that there were about 6000 men in the navy in the like case. It was comparatively rare, also, in the gaols, doubtless for the same reason that has been suggested for the army and navy. Howard mentions it in only three of the prisons visited by him[1033].
The range of severity in Smallpox, and its circumstances.
It has been abundantly shown in the foregoing, by the figures of Nettleton and others for Yorkshire and many other parts of England in 1722-27, of Frewen for Hastings in 1731, by the figures for each of the four parishes of Northampton in 1747, and by Haygarth’s census of each of the nine (or ten) parishes of Chester in 1774, that the average fatality of smallpox was one death in six or seven attacks[1034]. Any average of the kind represents a very wide range, as indeed the table of epidemics on p. 518 sufficiently shows; and as it is a matter of scientific interest to ascertain, if possible for smallpox as for other epidemic infections, the circumstances of its greater or lesser fatality, I shall endeavour to illustrate still farther the fact of its wide range from an extremely mild to an extremely severe disease, and to inquire into the circumstances or conditions of the same.
In the first place, selected ages were below or above the average. Isaac Massey, apothecary to Christ’s Hospital school, having boys to deal with at the most favourable of all ages for smallpox, found that not one had died of the 32 children “who are all that have had the smallpox, in the last two years, in that family”; and that “upon a strict review of thirty years business, and more, I have reason to think not 1 in 40 smallpox patients of the younger life have died, that is, above five and under eighteen[1035].” On the other hand the London Smallpox Hospital, whose patients, as the stereotyped phrase in the reports said, were “most of them adults, often admitted after great irregularities and when there are hardly any hopes of a cure,” had to acknowledge about one death in four or five cases on an average, which average, again, included such an unfavourable year as 1762, with 224 deaths in 844 cases.