[212] Id. “On the Comparative Health of the British Navy from the year 1799 to the year 1814, with Proposals for its farther Improvement.” Select Dissertations, 1822, p. 1.
[213] Le Cat, Phil. Trans. XLIX. 49.
[214] “Its cause seemed to be something contagious mixed with the contents of the stomach and intestines, especially the bile and alvine faeces, which absorbed thence contaminates the whole body and affects especially the cerebral functions.” Gent. Magaz., Article signed “S,” 1755, p. 151.
[215] James Johnstone, M.D., senior, Malignant Epidemic Fever of 1756. London, 1758.
[216] Nash, Hist. of Worcestershire, II. 39, found evidence in the Kidderminster registers that the fevers of 1727, 1728 and 1729 had “very much thinned the people, and terrified the inhabitants.” Watson, “On the Medical Topography of Stourport,” Trans. Proc. Med. Assoc., II., had heard or read somewhere that fever was so bad in Kidderminster in the first part of the 18th century that farmers were afraid to come to market.
[217] Huxham, Dissertation on the Malignant Ulcerous Sore-Throat. Lond. 1757, p. 60.
[218] Tooke, History of Prices. Introduction.
[219] In Shrewsbury gaol, in 1756, thirty-seven colliers were confined for rioting during the dearth. Four of them died in gaol, ten were condemned to death, of whom two were executed. Phillips, History of Shrewsbury, 1779, p. 213.
[220] Johnstone, u. s. Short says: “a slow, malignant, putrid fever in some parts of Yorkshire, Cheshire, Worcestershire and the low parts of Leicestershire, which carried off very many.” In October, 1757, it set in at Sheffield and raged all the winter.
[221] Short, Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England, etc. London, 1767, p. 109.