To the same period of epidemic fever in London, about 1709-10, belongs also a curiously localized epidemic in an Oxford college, which reminds one somewhat of the circumstances of enteric fever in our time. It was told to Dr Rogers of Cork twenty-five or twenty-six years before the date of his writing (1734), by one who was a student at Oxford then: “There broke out amongst the scholars of Wadham College a fever very malignant, that swept away great numbers, whilst the rest of the colleges remained unvisited. All agreed that the contagious infection arose from the putrefaction of a vast quantity of cabbages thrown into a heap out of the several gardens near Wadham College[92].”
The next epidemic of fever in London was in 1714. Like that of 1710, it followed a great rise in the price of wheat, or perhaps it followed the unseasonable weather which caused the deficient harvest. Before the Peace of Utrecht wheat in England was as low as 33s. 9d. per quarter, in 1712, the peace next year sending it no lower than 30s. But at Michaelmas, 1713, it rose with a bound to 56s. 11d., doubtless owing to a bad harvest. The fever-deaths in London began to rise in the spring of 1714, reaching a weekly total of 103 in the week ending 20 April. All through the summer and autumn they continued very high, the weekly totals exceeding, on an average, those of the year 1710, as in the foregoing table, and having corresponding large additions of “spotted fever.” The deaths from all causes in 1714 were a quarter more than those of the year before, the epidemic of fever being the chief contributor to the rise. This happened to be a very slack time in medical writing[93]; but, even in the absence of such testimony as we have for earlier and later epidemics of fever in London, we may safely conclude that the fever of 1714 was of the type of pestilential or malignant typhus, beginning in early summer and reaching a height in the old plague season of autumn.
A singular instance of what may be considered war-typhus belongs to the winter of 1715-16. The political intrigues preceding and following the death of Queen Anne in 1714 culminated in the Jacobite rising in Scotland and the North of England in 1715. The Jacobites having been defeated at Preston on 13 November, prisoners to the number of 450 were brought to Chester Castle on the Sunday night before December 1st. A fortnight later (December 15th), Lady Otway writes of the 450 prisoners in the Castle:
“They all lie upon straw, the better and the worse alike. The king’s allowance is a groat a day for each man for meat, but they are almost starved for want of some covering, though many persons are charitable to the sick.” The winter was unusually severe, the snow lying “a yard deep.” Many prisoners died in the Castle by “the severity of the season,” many were carried off by “a very malignant fever.” On February 16th Lady Otway writes again:—“So much sickness now in our Castle that they dye in droves like rotten sheep, and be 4 or 5 in a night throne into the Castle ditch ffor ther graves. The feavour and sickness increaseth dayly, is begun to spread much into the citty, and many of the guard solidyers is sick, it is thought by inffection. The Lord preserve us ffrom plague and pestilence[94]!”
Prosperity of Britain, 1715-65.
The fifty years from 1715 to 1765 were, with two or three exceptions, marked by abundant harvests, low prices and heavy exports of corn. This was undoubtedly a great time in the expansion of England, a time of fortune-making for the monied class, and of cheapness of the necessaries of life.
The well-being and comfort of the middle class were undoubtedly great; also there was something peculiar to England in the prosperity of towns and villages throughout all classes. In the very worst year of the period, the year 1741, Horace Walpole landed at Dover on the 13th September, having completed the grand tour of Europe. Like many others, he was delighted with the pleasant county of Kent as he posted towards London; and on stopping for the night at Sittingbourne, he wrote as follows in a letter:
“The country town delights me: the populousness, the ease, the gaiety, and well-dressed everybody, amaze me. Canterbury, which on my setting out I thought deplorable, is a paradise to Modena, Reggio, Parma, etc. I had before discovered that there was nowhere but in England the distinction of middling people. I perceive now that there is peculiar to us middling houses; how snug they are[95]!”
Our history henceforth has little to record of malignant typhus fevers, or of smallpox, in these snug houses of the middle class, although not only the middle class, but also the highest class had a considerable share of those troubles all through the 17th century. But the 18th century, even the most prosperous part of it, from the accession of George I. to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the last quarter or third of it, was none the less a most unwholesome period in the history of England. The health of London was never worse than in those years, and the vital statistics of some other towns, such as Norwich, are little more satisfactory. This was the time which gave us the saying, that God made the country and man made the town. Praise of rural felicity was a common theme in the poetry of the time, as in Johnson’s London:
“There every bush with nature’s music rings,
There every breeze bears health upon its wings.”