[533] Higden’s Polychronicon. Rolls Series, I. 332.
[534] Dyall of Agues. London, [1564].
[535] Essay on Epidemic Diseases. Dublin, 1734.
[536] Dissert. Epistol. § 93. Greenhill’s ed. p. 378.
[537] One regrets to find the above mistake in the learned pages of Murchison (p. 8). The following by Dr Robert Williams (Morbid Poisons, II. 423) is absolutely erroneous: “In Sydenham’s time, intermittent fever and dysentery were constantly endemic in London; and the mortality from the former cause alone averaged, in a comparatively small population, from one to two thousand persons annually.” What Sydenham says is that dysentery was endemic in Ireland (on the authority of Boate, no doubt), that it was epidemic in London in the end of 1669 and in the three years following, and that for the space of ten years it had appeared quite sparingly (quae per decennium jam parcius comparuerat). As to intermittents, he says they were absent from London for thirteen years, from 1664 to 1677, except in sporadic or imported cases. In the London bills the deaths from “agues” are sometimes distinguished from “fevers,” and are then seen to be only some dozen or twenty in two thousand.
[538] It is used in the Latin title of an Edinburgh graduation thesis, “De Catarrho epidemio, vel Influenza, prout in India occidentali sese ostendit,” by J. Huggar, which is assigned in Häser’s bibliography to the year 1703. Having been unable to find the thesis, I have not verified the date.
[539] Annales Monastici (St Albans), Rolls Series, No. 191, under the year 1427; Hist. MSS. Commiss. IX. pt. 1, p. 127, records of Canterbury Abbey.—An epidemic in Ireland a century before, in 1328, has been given by Sir W. R. Wilde, and by Dr Grimshaw following him, under the name of “murre,” as if that had been its name at the time. The explanation seems to be that the contemporary Irish name slaedan was rendered by Macgeoghegan, in his translation of the Annals of Clonmacnoise, by the 15th century English term “murre.” The “mure” of 1427 was a universal influenza; but the word was afterwards used for a common cold, along with poss, as in Gardiner’s Triall of Tabacco, 1610, fol. 12 and 15: “stuffings in the head, murres and pose, coughs”; and “the poze, murre, horsenesse, cough” etc.
[540] Cal. Cecil. MSS. I. under the dates.
[541] Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, I. 32.
[542] Cited in Southey’s Commonplace Book, from Fuller’s Pisgah Sight, p. 54.