1705-1706
| Week ending | Measles deaths | ||
| Oct. | 16 | 9 | |
| 23 | 9 | ||
| 30 | 12 | ||
| Nov. | 6 | 10 | |
| 13 | 30 | ||
| 20 | 34 | ||
| 27 | 29 | ||
| Dec. | 4 | 37 | |
| 11 | 46 | ||
| 18 | 44 | ||
| 25 | 22 | ||
| Jan. | 1 | 35 | |
| 8 | 33 | ||
| 15 | 28 | ||
| 22 | 20 | ||
| 29 | 18 | ||
| Feb. | 5 | 27 | |
| 12 | 11 | ||
| 19 | 26 | ||
| 26 | 28 | ||
| Mar. | 5 | 10 | |
| 12 | 10 | ||
| 19 | 9 | ||
| 26 | 13 | ||
| Apr. | 2 | 9 | |
| 9 | 9 | ||
The unusually large mortalities from measles in 1718-19 and in 1733 were again associated with a “constitution” otherwise sickly. The epidemic in the latter year, from the middle of March to the end of July, which had a maximum of 47 deaths in each of the two middle weeks of May, followed close upon a severe influenza. Like the epidemic of 1674, it was attended by a high mortality from other causes, especially “convulsions” and “consumption”; and, as the bills had now begun to give the ages at death, it is no longer doubtful, or merely conjectural, that the great excess of deaths under these and other heads was really among infants, or that a rise in “consumption” at that time of the year meant an increase in the wasting diseases of infancy. This was a period when any epidemic malady among London children was sure to go hard with many of them, the period, namely, when spirit drinking, besides ruining the health of the parents, rendered them, in the opinion of the College of Physicians, “too often the cause of weak, feeble and distempered children[1194].”
The intervals between epidemics of measles in London having been so considerable as the table shows, it is not surprising to find but casual mention of the disease in the chronicles of Wintringham, Hillary, and Huxham for England, of Rogers, O’Connell and Rutty for Ireland, and of the Edinburgh annalists. Wintringham, of York, whose annals extend from 1715 to 1730, records an epidemic of measles in 1721, which began in April and lasted all the summer, being for the most part of a bad type, attended with continual cough and inflammation of the lungs. Hillary, of Ripon, enters measles in 1726, “very common but mild,” autumn and winter being the season of it. Wintringham briefly mentions the same epidemic. Huxham of Plymouth has an entry of measles in the first year of his annals, 1727, in the month of July, followed by whooping-cough in December. Wintringham again enters measles at York in 1730 in the company of smallpox. In the annual accounts of the disease at Edinburgh, for a series of years beginning with 1731, measles is first mentioned in 1735[1195]. The epidemic began in June and became universal in December: “The progress of these measles along the west road of England towards Edinburgh was very remarkable, for they could be traced from village to village; and it was singular that the first person in Edinburgh who was seized with them was a lady in childbed, who saw nobody but her nurse and a friend who lived in the house with her”—an argument, apparently, for the doctrine of an epidemic “morbillous” constitution of the air. Five years after, we obtain the mortality statistics of Edinburgh, in the two great years of scarcity, typhus fever and sicknesses of all kinds, the years 1740 and 1741: in those two years measles must have been as general as smallpox if it were half as mortal, for the deaths set down to it in each year are 110 and 112, as compared with 274 and 206 from the more usual infantile infection. In like manner the second year of the disastrous epidemic of typhus in 1741-42, had the highest total of measles deaths in London until the great epidemic of 1808. While the high mortality of that year was due to special causes, it is at the same time clear from the following table that measles had not yet become a steady or perennial cause of death to the infancy of the capital:
| Year | Measles deaths | |
| 1741 | 42 | |
| 1742 | 981 | |
| 1743 | 17 | |
| 1744 | 5 | |
| 1745 | 14 | |
| 1746 | 250 | |
| 1747 | 81 | |
| 1748 | 10 | |
| 1749 | 106 | |
| 1750 | 321 | |
| 1751 | 21 | |
| 1752 | 111 | |
| 1753 | 253 | |
| 1754 | 12 | |
| 1755 | 423 | |
| 1756 | 156 | |
| 1757 | 24 | |
| 1758 | 696 | |
| 1759 | 316 | |
| 1760 | 175 | |
| 1761 | 394 | |
| 1762 | 122 | |
| 1763 | 610 | |
| 1764 | 65 | |
| 1765 | 54 | |
| 1766 | 482 | |
| 1767 | 80 | |
| 1768 | 409 | |
| 1769 | 90 | |
| 1770 | 325 | |
| 1771 | 115 | |
| 1772 | 211 | |
| 1773 | 199 | |
| 1774 | 121 | |
| 1775 | 283 | |
| 1776 | 153 | |
| 1777 | 145 | |
| 1778 | 388 | |
| 1779 | 99 | |
| 1780 | 272 | |
| 1781 | 201 | |
| 1782 | 170 | |
| 1783 | 185 | |
| 1784 | 29 | |
| 1785 | 20 | |
| 1786 | 793[1196] | |
| 1787 | 84 | |
| 1788 | 55 | |
| 1789 | 534 | |
| 1790 | 119 | |
| 1791 | 156 | |
| 1792 | 450 | |
| 1793 | 248 | |
| 1794 | 172 | |
| 1795 | 328 | |
| 1796 | 307 | |
| 1797 | 222 | |
| 1798 | 196 | |
| 1799 | 223 | |
| 1800 | 395 |
The considerable epidemic of 1755 is thus referred to by Fothergill in his monthly notes:
May: the measles more common than for some years, adults, who had not before had it, rarely escaping. June: measles common, smallpox rare. September and October: no epidemic disease but measles; few perished in proportion to all who took it[1197]. The epidemic of 1758 was more fatal, but Fothergill’s notes are not continued to that year. The elder Heberden says that measles was remarkably epidemical (in London) in 1753, which year has only 253 deaths in the bills, whereas the year 1755 has 423 deaths and the year 1758 has 696; but, as he implies that the type was mild, there would have been a multitude of cases to produce that number of deaths. It was a peculiarity of that epidemic, he says, that the cough preceded the outbreak of measles by seven or eight days, whereas it was usually but two or three days in advance of the eruption[1198].
At that period there would have been an epidemic of measles in London every other year, or once in three years, with a fatality from the direct effects seldom more than a sixth part that of an epidemic of smallpox. A London writer some twenty years after said that few escaped measles in infancy or childhood, while the deaths put down to it were only a tenth part of those due to smallpox on an average of years[1199]. The proportion of measles deaths to smallpox deaths was nearly the same in Manchester for twenty years from 1754 to 1774, according to Percival’s table of the burials in the register of the Collegiate Church where most of the poorer class were buried[1200]:
Annual averages of Burials from Measles etc. at the Collegiate Church, Manchester.
| Period | Measles | Smallpox | All deaths under two | Deaths at all ages | Baptisms | |||||
| 1754-58 | 21 | 64 | 209 | 651 | 678 | |||||
| 1759-63[1201] | 10·6 | 95 | 213 | 639 | 731 | |||||
| 1764-69 | 9·6 | 98 | 229 | 659 | 827 | |||||
| 1770-74 | 21·6 | 102 | 242 | 651 | 1062 |