In other places besides Sunderland there had been perhaps more than the usual amount of summer diarrhoea in 1831. Dr Burne, in his London dispensary reports, entered on the 2nd and 16th July an unusual prevalence of “dysenteric diarrhoea and cholera,” and cases of scarlet fever of an “adynamic” type or with a tendency to fatal collapse[1479]. (Clanny observed the same type of scarlatina at Sunderland along with some typhus.) Choleraic disorders were uncommonly rife on board the ships of war in the Medway[1480]. A succession of twenty-four cases at Port Glasgow, from 2 July to 2 August, chiefly among workers in Riga flax, gave rise to an alarm of the real Asiatic cholera, the more readily that the first case was fatal (the only death)[1481]. Similar alarms arose at Leith and Hull.
Asiatic Cholera at Sunderland in October, 1831.
In the end of July and in August, Sunderland and the adjoining villages and farms in the valley of the Wear were visited with “a very general prevalence of the indigenous cholera of the country, bearing in most instances its usual leading feature—that of excessive bilious discharges[1482].” Few, who were not attacked with actual cholera nostras, were altogether free, it was said, from diarrhoea or disordered digestion. Many of the choleraic cases were unusually malignant, of which the following are instances:
Allison, aged fifty, a painter of earthenware residing in a low situation on the bank of the Wear two miles above the town, was attacked at 4 a.m. on the 5th of August with vomiting and purging of a watery whitish fluid, like oatmeal and water. His hands and feet were cold, his skin covered with clammy sweat, his face livid and the expression anxious, his eyes sunken, his lips blue, thirst excessive, his breath cold, his voice weak and husky, and his pulse almost imperceptible. He passed into a stage of reactive fever and got well. Arnott, a farm-labourer on the opposite bank of the Wear from the man Allison, was seized at 2 a.m. on the 8th August with precisely the same symptoms, and died in twelve hours. Neither he nor Allison had any intercourse or relation with seamen or the shipping of Sunderland[1483]. Another case on the 8th of August came to light afterwards. A woman in the village of West Bolden, four miles from Sunderland, on the Newcastle road, was found by a surgeon from the town to be suffering from choleraic sickness, of which she died twelve hours from its onset[1484].
A week after these cases in the country not far from Sunderland, there occurred the death, on 14 August, of one of the Wear pilots named Henry. He had been troubled with diarrhoea for some time before, but not so as to keep him from his occupation. Having gone down in the direction of Flamborough Head to look for ships, he picked up a vessel between that and the Wear, piloted her in, and, a few days after, piloted her out again. The identity of the vessel was never traced, but it was alleged that she had come from an infected port abroad. The last time Henry was in his boat he was seized with violent vomiting and purging, and died at his house after an illness of twenty hours. A brother pilot, who looked in at the house on the day of his death, fell into a similar choleraic disorder, but recovered[1485]. On the 28th of August a shipwright died of the same; also about the end of August two persons at a distance of four or five miles from Sunderland. In September, it is said, there were other cases and fatalities. Early in October the authentic particulars of cholera in Sunderland begin. Dixon attended one case, which was fatal on the 9th October. Another case, which came to light three months after, was that of a girl of twelve, named Hazard, residing on the Fish Quay, who was well enough on Sunday the 16th October to have been twice at church. She was seized in the middle of the night following with the sudden and appalling symptoms of choleraic disease and died on the Monday afternoon[1486]. A few doors off on the same quay lived a keelman named Sproat, aged sixty; he occupied a large, clean, well-ventilated room on the first-floor of a house in the most open part of the quay, opposite to a crowded part of the anchorage. He was in failing health, and had been troubled with diarrhoea for a week or ten days previous to the 19th October, on which day he had to give up work. Next day, Thursday, the 20th, a surgeon who had been sent for found him vomiting and purging, but not at all collapsed, with no thirst, and in good spirits. He improved so much that on Friday he had toasted cheese for supper and on Saturday a mutton chop for dinner, after which he went out to his keel on the river for a few minutes. On his return he was seized with rigor, cramps, vomiting and purging. Medical aid was not sent for until seven on Sunday morning, when he was found in a sinking state, pulseless, speaking in a husky whisper, his face livid and pinched, his limbs cramped, the purgings like “meal washings.” He continued like that for three days, and died on Wednesday, the 26th October, at noon.
This came to be reckoned the first death from Asiatic cholera in England.
His grandchild, a girl of eleven, while moving about the room an hour after the death, was suddenly seized with faintness, pains in the stomach-region, vomiting and purging of watery matters; she was taken to the Infirmary and soon got well. The day after his father’s death, Thursday, the 27th October, William Sproat, junior, a fine athletic young keelman, who had attended on his parent during his illness, was found lying in a low damp cellar near to the Fish Quay, suffering from choleraic symptoms; he had been ill only a few hours, and was removed (with his daughter as above) to the Infirmary the same evening. He became gradually worse: on the 30th he was continually throwing himself about, moaning and biting the bedclothes; on the 31st he was lying on his back comatose, his eyes open, the pupils wide and insensible, and the breathing stertorous, in which state he died the same day. An old nurse at the Infirmary (Turnbull) helped to place the body in the coffin, went to bed in a state of considerable fear, and was seized at one in the morning with symptoms of cholera, of which she died after a few hours.
Meanwhile there had been two other fatal cases unconnected with the Sproats or the Fish Quay. On the quay of Monk Wearmouth, across the river, lived a shoemaker named Rodenburg, aged thirty-five. He occupied a poor hovel and had a large family, but he was in good work and wages. On Sunday, the 30th October, he had pork for dinner, and what was left of it for supper. In the middle of the night he was seized with vomiting, and with purging of a fluid like water-gruel in vast quantities; when visited by the medical men, he spoke in a husky whisper, his nails were blue, his skin livid, covered by cold sweat, his limbs cramped. The spasms ceased about nine o’clock on Monday morning; about noon he asked to be raised in bed, and died as they were raising him. On the very same night, between Sunday and Monday, a keelman named Wilson, who lived with his wife in a decent room in the High Street, and had attended the Methodist chapel on Sunday, was seized with cholera at 4 a.m. on Monday, and died the same afternoon at three.
These six cases within a few days, all fatal but that of the girl of eleven, looked like the real Asiatic disease. Kell, an army assistant-surgeon stationed at Sunderland with the reserve companies of the 82nd Regiment, had suspected that the earlier case of the pilot Henry was true Asiatic cholera (which he had seen in Mauritius in 1829), and had written to the Board of Health. At a meeting of the faculty at the Infirmary on the morning after the admission of Sproat junior and his child (28th October), Kell urged upon them that the disease was Asiatic cholera, but all the twelve present, save Dr Clanny, who was in the chair, maintained that it was common indigenous cholera. However, when the younger Sproat died, and the nurse after him, and two others in different parts of the town, a full meeting of medical men at the Exchange came unanimously to the opinion that these were cases of “spasmodic cholera.” A meeting of the Board of Health and leading citizens was at once held, who were informed that, in the unanimous opinion of the medical gentlemen of the town, “spasmodic cholera prevailed in Sunderland.” The authorities in London having been kept informed (principally by Kell), a surgeon of Indian experience was sent down by the Board of Health on the 5th November, and a colonel by the lords of the Council on the 6th, to act as commissioners.