The Aberdeen observer says that in town (the disease being milder in the country) there were troublesome symptoms in almost every case—a violent pain in the belly, frequently accompanied with diarrhoea (and even with vomiting), and with the dysenteric symptoms of tenesmus and mucus in the stools. This bowel complaint usually lasted three or four days, and wasted the patients remarkably. There was also the usual catarrh with violent tickling cough, and, after the acute attack, a tendency to sudden dyspnoea and “fatal coughs.” In some the convalescence was lingering and very distressing to the patient: “it consists in a slow kind of fever, with evening exacerbations[1214].”
The observers at Edinburgh and Aberdeen agree that the epidemic was the worst that had been seen for many years. Says the former[1215]: “I believe that the present epidemic has been more general in this place and its vicinity than ever happened within the remembrance of any medical man at present living, and I am sorry to say it has been very fatal.” The Aberdeen chronicler says the mortality was “greater than we have witnessed for a long period,” and that the epidemic was general throughout the whole of England and Scotland. But, besides this direct testimony, there is a not less indirectly significant fact of the epidemic. It affected many adults—“persons of all ages, who had never had them,” says the Aberdeen writer: few persons escaped, says the Edinburgh observer, “who had been previously unaffected by this disease.” The deaths from pulmonic complaints did not often happen among children, but among people somewhat advanced in life. Significant also was the outbreak in the Invernessshire Militia, which marched into Edinburgh in March while the epidemic was raging. Fifty men, all young recruits newly joined, were attacked in the course of a few days, the others escaping the disease though equally exposed to it; in some of those who died in the regiment there were found, on opening the thorax, fibrinous pleurisy and pericarditis, with effusion of fluid, as well as evidences of bronchial catarrh[1216]. The Aberdeen writer says: “I always observed that in full-grown persons the eruptions were more numerous, quicker in appearing, and longer in going off than in young subjects.... Many full-grown persons were very ill, yet the measles were more fatal to the young.” The implication of so many adults in the severe epidemic of 1808 would of itself show that measles had not been for some time before a steady and universal affection of infancy and childhood[1217].
Measles in Glasgow in 1808 and 1811-12: Researches of Watt.
The measles epidemic of 1808, which appears to have been somewhat general in England and Scotland, made an extraordinary impression in Glasgow. That disease had never before been nearly so mortal there, nor had any infection since the time of the plague, not even smallpox itself, engrossed the burial registers so much as measles did in the months of May and June, 1808. Glasgow had been the worst city in the kingdom for smallpox; by a somewhat sudden transition the infancy of the city died for a few months in larger numbers by the new disease than by the old. The highest monthly mortalities from smallpox had been 114 in October and 113 in November, 1791, the population being 66,578; but in 1808, the population having increased to 100,749 by the census of 1811, measles carried off 259 children in May and 260 in June, and in the months before and after as follows:
Measles in Glasgow, 1808.
| Month | Deaths | |
| Jan. | 2 | |
| Feb. | 2 | |
| March | 5 | |
| April | 71 | |
| May | 259 | |
| June | 260 | |
| July | 118 | |
| Aug. | 32 | |
| Sept. | 22 | |
| Oct. | 10 | |
| Nov. | 4 | |
| Dec. | 2 |
The figures were not known at the time; but every doctor in Glasgow, as well as the whole populace, knew that measles was cutting off the infants, while smallpox had fallen to insignificance. So dramatic was this turn in the public health that the common people set it down to the new practice of inoculating children with cowpox: ready to believe anything of vaccination, they concluded that, if it kept off smallpox, it brought on measles. Dr Robert Watt took the trouble to refute this singular notion; he found in his own practice that three children in one family, and in another two, had died of measles who had neither been vaccinated nor had smallpox before. Another great epidemic of measles arose in Glasgow three years after, in the winter of 1811-12:
| Measles deaths | |||
| 1811 | October | 12 | |
| November | 76 | ||
| December | 161 | ||
| 1812 | January | 130 | |
| February | 61 | ||
| March | 30 | ||
| April | 19 | ||
| May | 15 | ||
| June | 18 |
Those two great epidemics of measles in Glasgow, in 1808 and 1811-12, were the occasion of one of the earliest and most memorable inquiries in vital statistics in this country, the research by Dr Robert Watt on “the Relative Mortality of the Principal Diseases of Children, and the numbers who have died under ten years of age in Glasgow during the last thirty years[1218].” Having begun with a search of the principal Glasgow burial-registers for deaths by whooping-cough, he extended it to sixteen folio volumes of the registers of all the burial-grounds, old and new, and included the mortalities from all causes with the ages at death, and from fevers and the principal diseases of infancy and childhood. The increase of population from 1783, when his figures begin, to 1812, the date of his writing, was known to him; but as the numbers living at the respective periods of life were not known, he was obliged to state the change in the mortalities at the various ages, and from the various diseases, in ratios of the annual deaths from all causes,—a perfectly scientific comparison so long as the nature of the ratios compared was clearly stated. It would have been more satisfactory, of course, if the comparison could have been made in terms of the annual death-rate, which was much lower (for reasons already explained), in the second half of his period than in the first; but, in the circumstances, that was impracticable, and Watt did the next best thing. The following is the principal part of his table of ratios in five successive periods of six years each:
Vital Statistics of Glasgow in sexennial periods, 1783-1812. (Watt.)