The ages of those who died of measles “in six years from 1768 to 1774,” to the number of 91, were as follows:
| Total | 3 mo. | -6 mo. | -12 mo. | -2 years | -3 | -4 | -5 | -10 | -20 | -30 | ||||||||||
| 91 | 2 | 3 | 10 | 31 | 25 | 7 | 9 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
Fifty were males, forty-one females—a preponderance of males which is according to rule. Of the whole ninety-one, no fewer than fifty-one died in June of the several years.
In the smaller and more healthy towns, such as Northampton, the epidemics of measles came at long intervals and caused but few deaths:
Infantile Causes of Death, All Saints, Northampton[1202].
| Year | Measles | Whooping-cough | Convulsions | Teething | ||||
| 1742 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 8 | ||||
| 1743 | — | — | 21 | 2 | ||||
| 1744 | — | 3 | 14 | 4 | ||||
| 1745 | — | — | 22 | 7 | ||||
| 1746 | — | 3 | 19 | 3 | ||||
| 1747 | 7 | — | 29 | — | ||||
| 1748 | — | — | 24 | 4 | ||||
| 1749 | — | 6 | 15 | 4 | ||||
| 1750 | 1 | — | 17 | 1 | ||||
| 1751 | — | — | 14 | 6 | ||||
| 1752 | — | 1 | 13 | 6 | ||||
| 1753 | } | not published | ||||||
| 1754 | ||||||||
| 1755 | — | 1 | 8 | 1 | ||||
| 1756 | — | 2 | 10 | 2 | ||||
| 1757 | 1 | 1 | 28 | 4 |
In the parish of Holy Cross, a suburb of Shrewsbury, there were 4 deaths from measles in the ten years 1750-60, and 15 in the ten years 1760-70, the smallpox deaths having been respectively 33 and 46. Ackworth, in Yorkshire, may represent the country parishes. It had no deaths from measles from 1747 to 1757, two deaths from 1757 to 1767. At Kilmarnock during thirty-six years from 1728 to 1764, there were 93 deaths from measles, 52 of them in the period 1747-52, and only 11 in the next twelve years. Sims, of Tyrone, having described an epidemic of smallpox which desolated the close of 1766 and spring of 1767 with unheard of havoc (it had been out of the country for some years), mentions farther that an epidemic of measles followed immediately: “Before the close of the summer solstice the measles sprang up with a most luxuriant growth,” and was followed in harvest by whooping-cough.
Wherever we have the means of comparison by figures, it appears that measles caused by its direct fatality not more than a sixth part of the deaths by smallpox in Britain generally. But in the colonies, where an epidemic of smallpox was a rare event of the great seaports, and as much an affair of adults as of children, measles seems to have been more fatal, dividing with diphtheria or scarlatina the great bulk of the infectious mortality of childhood. Thus Webster enters under 1772: “In this year the measles appeared in all parts of America with unusual mortality. In Charleston died 800 or 900 children”; and under 1773: “In America the measles finished its course and was followed by disorders in the throat”—especially in 1775[1203]. It is only among the children of public institutions in England that we find in the corresponding period a similar predominance of measles and scarlatina over smallpox. In the Infirmary Books of the Foundling Hospital the more general outbreaks of smallpox cease after 1765, while epidemics of measles, extending to perhaps a third or more of the inmates, as well as great epidemics of scarlatina, begin after that date to be common[1204].
In the Infirmary Book from which the following extracts are taken, the number of deaths is not stated. The number of children in the Hospital was 312 in 1763, 368 in 1766 and 438 in 1768.
1763. Before the date of the Infirmary Book, Watson records an epidemic of putrid measles from 21 April to 9 June, 1763, which attacked 180 and caused 19 immediate deaths.