| Year | Cured | Dead | Total | |||
| 1783 | 75 | 1 | 76 | |||
| 1784 | 401 | 9 | 410 | |||
| 1785 | 350 | 20 | 370 | |||
| 1786 | 91 | 6 | 97 | |||
| 1787 | 21 | 1 | 22 | |||
| 1788 | 53 | 7 | 60 | |||
| 1789 | 103 | 2 | 105 | |||
| 1790 | 288 | 21 | 309 | |||
| 1791 | 74 | 6 | 79 | |||
| 1792 | 17 | 2 | 19 | |||
| 1793 | 7 | 3 | 10 | |||
| 1794 | 13 | 1 | 14 | |||
| 1795 | 28 | 2 | 30 | |||
| 1796 | 48 | 1 | 49 | |||
| 1797 | 35 | 2 | 37 | |||
| 1798 | 12 | 1 | 13 | |||
| 1799 | 11 | 1 | 12 | |||
| Total | 1627 | 85 | 1712 |
The year 1790 is indicated as an unhealthy one, by the excess of burials over christenings, also at Macclesfield, where there were 316 christenings to 380 burials, the proportion being usually the other way[273].
Dr John Alderson of Hull wrote in 1788 an essay on the contagion of fever, in which there are no authentic details for Hull: “The calamity itself is the constant complaint of every neighbourhood, and almost every newspaper presents us with an example of the direful consequences of infection”—the reference being to gaols more particularly[274]. Whatever was the reason, there was undoubtedly a great deal of typhus in England in the eighties of the eighteenth century. Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire experienced much typhus from 1782 to 1785, although we have few particulars. “The remembrance of its ravages at Gloucester, Worcester and Marlborough,” says Dr Wall of Oxford, “is still fresh in every mind, where its virulence proved so peculiarly fatal to the medical world.” At Aylesbury, Dr Kennedy survived an attack of the “contagious fever,” to write an account (1785) of the epidemic, which he traced to the gaol (the date, be it observed, is subsequent to Howard’s visitations)[275]. At Maidstone, also, in 1785, the gaol fever was the subject of a special account[276].
At Worcester in 1783 the younger Dr Johnstone caught typhus while visiting the gaol, which was thereafter rebuilt at great expense. A prisoner took it to Droitwich where 14 died[277].
Dr Wall gives clinical details of fifteen cases of typhus treated by him in private practice at Oxford in 1785; one of his patients was an apothecary whose business had exposed him very much to the influence of contagion, as he was much employed amongst the poor in the suburbs of the town and neighbouring villages and in the House of Industry[278]. In the year 1783-85, much of the epidemic fever was of the nature of ague, as described in another chapter. It is not always easy to separate it from typhus; but there is no doubt that both were prevalent together. Thus in the parish of Painswick, Gloucestershire, in the spring of 1785 there occurred both “a contagious fever” and an “epidemic ague,” the latter having left a good many persons dropsical and cachectic[279]. This had been part of an epidemical fever which had raged for some time in the county of Gloucestershire, and is said to have lately carried off a great number of poor. At Norton, within five miles of Gloucester, there lived in two adjoining tenements two families: in one a man and his wife and three children, in the other a man and his wife, of whom only one remained alive on the 1st of March, 1785[280].
The extraordinary failure of the harvest in Scotland in 1782 produced much distress, and with it fever, in the winter following. The Glasgow and Edinburgh municipalities imported grain for the public benefit. Various traces of the scarcity and fever appear in the Statistical Account written a few years after. Thus, in Holywood parish, Dumfriesshire, some fevers were wont to appear in February and March among people of low circumstances living in a narrow valley; and the unusual mortality in the dear year 1782 was owing to an infectious fever in the same cottages. In the regular bills of mortality of Torthorwald parish, Dumfriesshire, the deaths from “fever” fall in the dear years, 1782-3, 1785, &c. In Dunscore parish, in the same county, the burials of 1782 rose to the most unusual figure of 30 (the baptisms being 17), “owing to a malignant fever[281].”
But Scotland was now past the danger of actual famine from even a total failure of the harvest. Some farmers were ruined, and many more were unable to pay the year’s rent; but the very poorest were enabled to find food, one source being “the importation of white pease from America.” From Delting, in Shetland, one of the poorest parishes, the report is: “There is reason to believe that none died from mere want; but there is no doubt that many, from the unwholesome food, contracted diseases that brought them to their graves.”
The following relating to the parishes of Keithhall and Kinkell, Aberdeenshire, in the scarcity following the lost harvest of 1782, is a curiously detailed glimpse of the time:
“Several families who would not allow their poverty to be known lived on two diets of meal a day. One family wanted food from Friday night till Sunday at dinner. On the last Friday of December, 1782, the country people could get no meal in Aberdeen, as the citizens were afraid of a famine; and a poor man, in this district, could find none in the country the day after. But the distress of this family being discovered, they were supplied. Next day the [Kirk] session bought at a sale a considerable quantity of bere, which was made into meal. This served the poor people until the importation at Aberdeen became regular, and every man of humanity rejoiced that the danger of famine was removed[282].”
We hear most of fevers in the Highland parishes, with their subdivisions of holdings and an excess of population. Thus of Gairloch, Ross-shire, it is said: “Fevers are frequent, sometimes they are of a favourable kind, at other times they continue long and carry off great numbers”—the poor in this parish, upon the Kirk Session roll, numbering 84 in the year 1792, and the aggregate money paid to the whole number averaging £6. 7s. in a year, whereas the fertile parish of Ellon, Aberdeenshire, with 40 on the poor’s roll, paid them £43 per annum.