The other chief centres of cholera in the northern coal district, besides those mentioned, were Houghton-le-Spring and Hetton (which had together 311 cases and 66 deaths to the 28 of January), the colliery village of Earsden, and the port of Tynemouth.
The Cholera of 1832 in Scotland.
It was not until April that the infection began to show itself on the same scale in other parts of England. The next parts of the kingdom to be invaded after the Wear and the Tyne were the coal and iron districts of East Lothian and Lanarkshire, the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow becoming infected soon after. A fatal case, in a destitute tramping sailor occurred at Doncaster, in the beginning of January, but led to no outbreak; two fatal cases occurred at Morpeth about the same time, the second of the two in a bagman who had just spent three days making his rounds in Newcastle and the infected villages near it. It was on the high road to Edinburgh, at Haddington, Tranent and Musselburgh, that the next focus of cholera was established. Previous to the 14th of January there had been 47 cases, with 18 deaths, in and near Haddington, among the miners and others of the labouring class. At Tranent, seven miles nearer Edinburgh on the main road, with a population of 1700 miners and labourers, a boy died of cholera on the 18th January, the infection spreading so rapidly that before the 25th there had been 61 attacks with 26 deaths, which rose to 205 attacks and 60 deaths by the 8th of February. A few cases occurred also at North Berwick and a good many at Preston Pans; while Musselburgh became the scene of one of the most deadly outbreaks in the whole history.
Musselburgh, with Fisherrow, was not then the place of villas which it afterwards became, but was occupied by a working class, who combined the three industries of coal-mining, weaving or other factory work, and fishing. To add to the ordinary insanitary risks of such a combination, some fifteen hundred hands had been out of work for two months, and were in “a state of great misery.” The first case of cholera appeared there on Wednesday, the 18th January, three days after the first death at Tranent. The virulence and certainty of the infection will appear from the following by D. M. Moir, the distinguished author of Mansie Waugh and other writings in prose or verse, who practised his profession at Musselburgh:
“A girl at Musselburgh, whose mother kept a lodging-house, was found in a state of complete collapse on the morning of Thursday, the 19th January—the day after the first appearance of the pestilence. She died on that afternoon, between five and six, and was buried by moonlight the same evening.... The mother during the night of Saturday was also similarly seized, and fell a victim on the following noon. Her sister, who had walked from Leith on the same morning to condole with her in her family distress, was immediately affected on entering the house; but her symptoms being overlooked in the misery around her, medical assistance was not called in, until, on the return of the nieces from the interment, their aunt was discovered dead on the floor of the dwelling. Her husband, Baxter, a man of intemperate habits, came out to enquire into her fate; and immediately on his return home to Leith was seized with the distemper and died.”
In three weeks there were more deaths from cholera than from all causes in the whole of an ordinary year. To the 22nd of February, just over a month from its outbreak, the disease had attacked 435, of whom 193 died. The medical profession (the senior of whom was a man of original talent, Thomas Brown, author of an essay on smallpox, in 1808, and one on the Indian cholera in 1824), were greatly taxed by the numerous calls upon them: Moir met one night a young colleague who complained of feeling ill, and was advised by the former to go home at once; he continued his rounds for an hour longer, and died of cholera next morning. Edinburgh, only five miles distant, was in constant communication with Musselburgh; and at length three or four cases appeared in the city in persons who had been at the infected place. The Edinburgh cases, however, did not multiply rapidly; to the 8th of February, there had been 8 cases with four deaths; to the 28th of February, 35 cases, with 18 deaths; to the 20th of March, 39 cases, with 20 deaths. On the other hand, the suburb of Water of Leith, had 48 cases, with 23 deaths at the same date. On the 6th April, 1832, the figures for Edinburgh and certain of its suburbs respectively were:
| Cases | Deaths | |||
| Portobello | 44 | 24 | ||
| Water of Leith | 58 | 30 | ||
| Canonmills | 18 | 12 | ||
| Duddingston | 10 | 3 | ||
| Edinburgh | 62 | 38 |
Of the border towns, Hawick was infected on the 14th January, probably from Morpeth, and had a not very extensive epidemic, of somewhat mild type[1495]. Coldstream, on the Tweed, a few miles above Berwick, had 109 cases and 37 deaths to the 20th of March.
Meanwhile the infection had sought out the weak spots in the west of Scotland—the mining and weaving villages in Lanarkshire, the city of Glasgow and the manufacturing town of Paisley. On Sunday, the 22nd January, a boy was taken ill in church at Kirkintilloch (a village on the Forth and Clyde canal, seven miles north-east of Glasgow), and died next morning: that was the first case in the west of Scotland. Cases multiplied in Kirkintilloch, so that by the 6th of March there had been thirty-two deaths, but no more for the rest of the season. A few days after the boy was seized in church there, a first case occurred in the mining village of Coatbridge, six or seven miles to the south-east, in an old man living in a “back land” in very poor circumstances, who had not been in Kirkintilloch nor had communication with such as had been there; other cases followed slowly, and at length there was a more severe outbreak.
Glasgow at once took precautions. A Board of Health had been formed there early in the summer of 1831. In February, it had command of £8000 raised by voluntary subscriptions, and it made provision of 236 cholera beds in five hospitals. The theatres were closed, and “evening sermons” discouraged; while all the passenger boats (for a time also the goods barges) on the Forth and Clyde canal, and on the Monkland canal (near to which was Coatbridge) were stopped. District committees were formed in all parts of the city.