[87] W. Butter, M.D., A Treatise on the Infantile Remittent Fever. Lond. 1782.
[88] Philip Guide, M.D., A Kind Warning to a Multitude of Patients daily afflicted with different sorts of Fevers. Lond. 1710.
[89] One death from “malignant fever,” two from scarlet fever.
[90] Hunter’s Hallamshire, ed. Gatty.
[91] Brand, Hist. of Newcastle, II. 308. Swift writes to Stella on 8 December, 1710: “We are terribly afraid of the plague; they say it is at Newcastle. I begged Mr Harley [the Lord President] for the love of God to take some care about it, or we are all ruined. There have been orders for all ships from the Baltic to pass their quarantine before they land; but they neglect it. You remember I have been afraid these two years.” The orders referred to were probably the Order of Council of 9 Nov. 1710. Parliament met on the 25th Nov. and passed the first Quarantine Act (9 Anne, cap. II.). Swift had a good deal to say with Ministers on many subjects, and it is not impossible, however absurd, that his had been the first suggestion to Harley of a quarantine law. I had purposed including a history of quarantine in Britain, but can find no convenient context for it. I shall therefore refer the reader to the historical sketch which I have appended to the Article “Quarantine” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed.
[92] Essay on Epidemic Diseases. Dublin, 1734, p. 34.
[93] Dr Guide, a Frenchman, who had been in practice in London for many years, says in his Kind Warning to a Multitude of Patients daily afflicted with different sorts of Fevers (1710) “the British physicians and surgeons are lately fallen into an unhappy and terrible confusion and mixture of honest and fraudulent pretenders.” Another writer of 1710, Dr Lynn, quoted in the chapter on Smallpox, implies that physicians were taking an unusually cynical view of their business. The most interesting essay of the time on fevers is by J. White, M.D. (De recta Sanguinis Missione &c. Lond. 1712), a Scot who had been in the Navy and afterwards in practice at Lisbon; but it throws no light upon the London fevers.
[94] Elizabeth, Lady Otway, to Benj. Browne, Dec. 1st and 15th, 1715, and Feb. 16, 1716. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4, p. 352; Hemingway’s Hist. of Chester, II. 244.
[95] Letters, ed. Cunningham, I. 72.
[96] Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, VI. 204:—“All the evidence we possess concurs in showing that during the first three-quarters of the century the position of the poorer agricultural classes in England was singularly favourable. The price of wheat was both low and steady. Wages, if they advanced slowly, appear to have commanded an increased proportion of the necessaries of life, and there were all the signs of growing material well-being. It was noticed that wheat bread, and that made of the finest flour, which at the beginning of the period had been confined to the upper and middle classes, had become before the close of it over the greater part of England the universal food, and that the consumption of cheese and butter in proportion to the population in many districts almost trebled. Beef and mutton were eaten almost daily in villages.”