[1187] Cal. State Papers, Domestic. Charles II. s. d. It appears from the Pyretologia by Drage, of Hitchin (1665), that the natural history of measles must have been familiar, for he mentions that its incubation period was from fourteen to fifteen days: p. 20.
[1188] Obs. Med. 3rd ed. (1675), Bk. IV. chap. 5.
[1189] Sydenham, Obs. Med. 1675, v. 3. “Morbilli anni 1674.” It entered almost every household, as on the last occasion, attacking infants more especially. It had some points of difference from the measles of 1670. The rash was less uniformly on the fourth day, now sooner, now later; it would come on the arms or trunk before the face; nor was it followed by the branny powdering which was as obvious in the measles of 1670 as it was usual to see it after scarlatina. Along with these anomalies of the rash, the consecutive fever and peripneumonia were also more severe, and a more frequent cause of death. But in the principal characters of measles the disease of 1674 was the same as that of 1670, and called for no fresh description. Among Sydenham’s patients were the children of the Countess of Salisbury, who all took measles in turn, and all passed through the attack and its sequelae without danger, under a particular regimen which is detailed. It is of great interest to see how this season of anomalous measles looks in the weekly bills, as in the above table.
[1190] Richard Morton, M.D. Pyretologia. 2 vols. Lond. 1692-94, I. 427. He places it in the year 1672 and in the six months of autumn and winter; and in another place (II. 71), where he cites clinical cases, he again gives the year 1672 as that in which measles “epidemice Londini publice grassabantur.” He compares the epidemic to a pestis mitior, and says that the disease had never been epidemic again to the date of his writing (1692-94). It is tolerably clear that, in writing twenty years after, he had forgotten the year and even the season—not the only error in dates in his work. Sydenham’s account of the great measles epidemic of spring and summer, 1674, was published the year after, and is exactly borne out by the weekly bills of mortality. Morton’s obvious mistake of the date is the subject of a refutation four pages long by Thomas Dickson, M.D., F.R.S., physician to the London Hospital, in Med. Obs. and Inquiries, IV. (1771), p. 266.
[1191] Fothergill (Gentleman’s Magazine, Dec. 1751) says, in a criticism of the Bills of Mortality: “If the body is emaciated, which may happen even from an acute fever, ’tis enough for them to place it to the article of consumption.” And of course they would do so the more readily if the acute fever, say measles, were past, and its sequelae had been the cause of death. Referring to Kidderminster in 1756, Johnstone says: “Measles at this time went through our town and neighbourhood: vast numbers of children died tabid.” It is to be remarked that the fever column is augmented but little during the measles of 1674, a fact which shows that the inflammatory causes of death, such as capillary bronchitis and pneumonia (specially recorded by Sydenham for this epidemic), were more apt to be entered under “consumption” than under “fevers.”
[1192] See Watson’s account of smallpox following measles at the Foundling Hospital, supra, p. 550.
[1193] It may have been this high mortality that Dover had in mind when he wrote, in 1733: “I do not remember I ever heard of anyone’s dying of this disease [measles] till about twenty-five years since; but of late, by the help of Gascoin’s powder and bezoartic bolusses, together with blisters and a hot regimen, the blood is so highly inflamed and the fever encreased to that degree that it is become equally mortal with the smallpox.” Physician’s Legacy, 1733, p. 116.
[1194] Memorial to the House of Commons, supra, p. 84.
[1195] Edin. Med. Essays and Obs. V. 26.
[1196] Pronounced by Sims to have been wholly scarlatina, and by Willan to have been in part that disease.