[738] Hall, Prov. Med. Journ. 1844, p. 315.
[739] M’Coy, Med. Press, XI. 133.
[740] Fleetwood Churchill, Dubl. Quart. Journ., May, 1847, p. 373.
[741] Farr, in Rep. Reg.-Gen.
[742] Farr, in the Report of the Registrar-General for 1848. He cites (p. xxxi) Stark for Scotland, that it “suddenly attacked great masses of the population twice during November”—on the 18th, and again on the 28th.
[743] A curious trace of the temporary interest excited by influenza in 1847-8 remains in a great book of the time, Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, the third edition of which, with new letters, was then under hand. One of the new letters related to the death of Colonel Pickering from the camp-sickness among the troops of Fairfax at Ottery St Mary in December, 1645. Carlyle’s comment is: “has caught the epidemic ‘new disease’ as they call it, some ancient influenza very prevalent and fatal during those wet winter operations.” “New disease” was the name given by Greaves to the war-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1643, but neither that nor the sickness at Ottery (which is not called “new disease” in the documents) had anything of the nature of influenza.
[744] But Dr Rose Cormack, who had known relapsing fever well in Edinburgh, wrote from Putney, near London, in October, 1849: “For some months past the majority of cases of all diseases in this neighbourhood have ... presented a well-marked tendency to assume the remittent and intermittent types.” “Infantile Remittent Fever,” Lond. Journ. of Med., Oct. 1849, reprinted in his Clinical Studies, 2 vols., 1876.
[745] T. B. Peacock, M.D., On the Influenza, or Epidemic Catarrhal Fever of 1847-8. London, 1848.
[746] Haviland, Journ. Pub. Health, IV. 288, (94 cases in June-Aug. in a village).
[747] See F. Clemow, M.D., of St Petersburg, “The Recent Pandemic of Influenza: its place of origin and mode of spread.” Lancet, 20 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1894. These papers bring together and discuss the Russian opinions, official and other. The Army Medical Report favoured the view that the birthplace of this pandemic in the autumn of 1889 was an extensive region occupied by nomadic tribes in the northern part of the Kirghiz Steppe. There is evidence of its rapid progress westwards over Tobolsk to the borders of European Russia. Influenza is said to be constantly present in many parts of the Russian Empire; but the circumstances that have, on four or five occasions in the 19th century, set the infection rolling in a great wave westwards from the assumed source are wholly unknown.