Again, of the fishing village of Eyemouth, it is said: “The only complaints that prove mortal in this place are different kinds of fevers and consumptions; and these are mostly confined to the poorest class of people, and ascribed to their scanty diet.” And of another fishing parish, in Banffshire, Fordyce, including Portsoy, it is said: “The most prevalent distemper is a fever, and that for the most part not universal, but confined to particular districts. It is sometimes thought to arise from infection and communication with other parts of the country; at other times from local situations and circumstances of the people’s houses and habits of living in particular districts[283].”

The beginning of the great French war was the occasion of a considerable increase of fever; although no records make it appear so fatal a time as the years 1783-86. The commercial distress and want of work which began in the autumn of 1792, were intensified by the bad harvests of 1794 and 1795, which followed two harvests also deficient. This was the period of distress and of epidemic fever to which Wordsworth referred in the passage in the first book of the ‘Excursion,’ where he is relating the story of Margaret’s ruined cottage[284].

There is little medical writing upon the epidemic fever of 1794-95; and, in the very district of Wordsworth’s story, the records of the Whitehaven Dispensary bear no traces of a great concourse of patients. There is reason to think that the fever, if slow and weakening, was seldom fatal, that it was typhus mitior, and that it was sometimes, perhaps often, relapsing. One glimpse we get of it in the family of the afterwards celebrated Dr Edward Jenner of Berkeley, in the winter of 1794-95. He thus writes to a friend about the visitation of “grim-visaged typhus:”

“You shall hear the history of our calamities. First fell Henry’s [his nephew and assistant] wife and sister. From the early use of bark, they both appeared to recover; but the former, after going about her ordinary business for some days, had a dreadful relapse which nearly destroyed her. It was during my attendance on this case that the venomed arrow wounded me.... Like Mrs Jenner’s fever, at an early period there was a clear intermission for four days.... On the eighth day after the first seizure it again set in, in good earnest, and continued one-and-twenty days.... Dr Parry was with me from Bath five times, Dr Hicks and Dr Ludlow as many, and my friend George was never absent from my bedside.... But, to return to that mansion of melancholy, Henry’s. His infant girl has now the fever; a servant maid in the house is dying with it; and to complete this tragical narrative, about five days ago fell poor Henry himself. His symptoms at present are such as one might expect: violent pain in the head, vertigo, debility, transient shiverings.... His pulse this evening is sunk from 125 to 100. The stench from the poor girl is so great as to fill the house with putrid vapour; and I shall remove him this morning by means of a sedan-chair to a cottage near my own house[285].”

This is a tolerably clear picture of a short-period fever with relapses, or of relapsing fever strictly so-called; the stench, also, of one patient is characteristic. Barker, of Coleshill or Birmingham, has much to say under the same year 1794, of a slow, tedious fever, marked by “sluggish action and comatose symptoms,” and much subject to relapses; but he does not give the duration of the first or subsequent paroxysms, as Jenner does, or the usual length of the clear intervals, his most definite case being of a young woman who died in twenty-four hours from a relapse which came on about three weeks after the fever had left her[286].

It was the access of fever in 1794-5, and the alarm that it caused among the richer classes, that led to the opening of the Manchester House of Recovery in 1796. In certain streets in the neighbourhood chosen for the hospital, Portland Street, Silver Street and others in the same block, the cases of contagious fever for nearly three years before the hospital was opened are given by Ferriar as follows:

Sept. 1793 to Sept. 1794,casesoffever,400
Sept. 1794 to Sept. 1795,"""389
Sept. 1795 to May 1796,"""267

The cases began to be sent to the hospital on the 27th May, 1796, and an attempt was made to extinguish contagion in the houses, by white-washing, disinfecting and the like; so that in the same group of streets there were only 25 cases of fever from 13 July, 1794 to 13 March, 1797. Meanwhile the admissions to the hospital were few until the dearth of 1799-1802. One of the manufacturing towns which is known to have shared in the epidemic fever of 1794-96 was Ashton-under-Lyne, where upwards of three hundred cases (with few deaths) occurred in less than three months at the end of 1795. This epidemic must have been somewhat special to Ashton, for it produced much alarm in neighbouring places and caused Ashton to be avoided from fear of infection.

Shortly after 1796, Ferriar made an inquiry into an epidemic of fever at a village within a mile of Manchester; the houses were many of them new, built for the convenience of a large cotton mill; but even the new houses were offensive, with cellars occupied by lodgers, and almost every house overcrowded. This was the first fever in the village, and it was traced to a family who had come from Manchester with infected clothes. Stockport about the same time erected a House of Recovery, having “the same general causes of fever which render the disease so common in Manchester”; and Ferriar adds: “I believe there is not a town in the kingdom containing four thousand inhabitants which would not be greatly benefited by similar establishments.”

The bad harvest of 1794 raised the price of wheat to 55s. 7d. on 1 January, 1795, and the prospect of another short harvest to 77s. 2d. on 1 July. A famine being threatened, the Government caused neutral ships bound to French ports with corn to be seized, and brought into English ports, the owners receiving an ample profit. Agents were also sent to the Baltic to buy corn. By these means the price of wheat, which had risen in August to 108s. 4d., fell in October to 76s. 9d. Parliament met on the 29th October, and various measures were taken[287]. In the spring of 1796, the climax of distress was reached, wheat being at 100s. per quarter. The harvest of 1796 was abundant and wheat fell to 57s. 3d. The harvests of 1797 and 1798 were not equally good, but they were not altogether bad, and the price of wheat kept about 50s. for nearly three years, which were years of comparative comfort between the dearth of 1794-96 and the dearth of 1799-1802.