[184] Lind (Two Papers on Fevers and Infection, London, 1763, p. 113) gives an instance where the poisonous effluvia of the ship’s well did not spread through the ’tween decks: “The following accident happened lately [written in 1761] in the Bay of Biscay. In a ship of 60 guns, by the carpenter’s neglecting to turn the cock that freshens the bilge-water, which had not been pumped out for some time, a large scum, as is usual, or a thick tough film was collected a-top of it. The first man who went down to break this scum in order to pump out the bilge-water was immediately suffocated. The second suffered an instantaneous death in like manner. And three others, who successively attempted the same business, narrowly escaped with life: one of whom has never since perfectly recovered his health. Yet that ship was at all times, both before and after this accident, remarkably healthy.” It was the contention of Renwick, a naval surgeon who wrote in 1794, that it was the stirring of the bilge-water in being discharged from the ship’s well, or the adding of fresh water to the foul, that caused the offensive emanations. “Hence the first cause of febrile sickness in all ships recently commissioned.” Renwick made so much of the foul bilge-water as a cause that he thought the fevers ought to be termed “bilge-fevers.” Letter to the Critical Reviewer, p. 42.
[185] These particulars are not given in Freind’s special work on Peterborough’s campaign, which deals only with the military and political history, but in his Nine Commentaries on Fever (Engl. ed. by Dale, London, 1730), and in a Latin letter to Cockburn, dated Barcelona, 9 Sept. 1706, which was first printed in Several Cases in Physic. By Pierce Dod, M.D. London, 1746.
[186] Smollett joined the ‘Cumberland’ as surgeon’s mate in 1740, before she sailed with the fleet sent out under Vernon and others to Carthagena. His account in Roderick Random of the sick-bay of the ‘Thunder’ as she lay at the Nore is doubtless veracious: “When I observed the situation of the patients, I was much less surprised that people should die on board, than that any sick person should recover. Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another that not more than fourteen inches space was allowed for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition.” Chap. XXV. He wrote a separate account of the fatal Carthagena expedition in a compendium of voyages.
[187] Coxe’s Life of Marlborough. Bohn’s ed. I. 183.
[188] Grainger’s essay, Historia febris anomalae Bataviae annorum, 1746, 1747, 1748, etc. Edin. 1753, is chiefly occupied with an anomalous “intermittent” or “remittent” fever with miliary eruption, and with dysentery.
[189] For a full discussion of the relation of dysentery to typhus, see Virchow, “Kriegstypus und Ruhr.” Virchow’s Archiv, Bd. LII. (1871), p. 1.
[190] Sir John Pringle, Obs. on the Nature and Cure of Hospital and Jayl Fever, Lond. 1750 (Letter to Mead); and his Obs. on Diseases of the Army, Lond. 1752 (fullest account).
[191] Pringle, Diseases of the Army, pp. 40-45.
[192] Ibid. p. 68.
[193] Donald Monro, M.D. Diseases of British Military Hospitals in Germany, from Jan. 1761 to the Return of the Troops to England in 1763. Lond. 1764. The same campaign called forth also Dr Richard Brocklesby’s Œconomical and Medical Observations from 1758 to 1763 on Military Hospitals and Camp Diseases etc. London, 1764.