| Year | Fever cases | ||
| 1827 | 1084 | ||
| 1828 | 1511 | ||
| 1829 | 865 | ||
| 1830 | 729 | ||
| 1831 | 1657 | ||
| 1832 | 1589 | } | |
| 1148[360] | |||
| 1833 | 1288 | ||
| 1834 | 2003 | ||
| 1835 | 1359 | ||
| 1836 | 3125 | ||
| 1837 | 5387[361] | ||
| 1838 | 2047 | ||
| 1839 | 1529 | ||
The worst year of the series for fever was 1837, and the worst month of that year was May, when the fever-deaths were 1 in 3·22 of the mortality from all causes. That great access of fever in Glasgow followed immediately upon the great strike of the cotton-spinners, on 8th April, 1837, by which eight thousand persons, mostly women, were thrown out of work[362]. The death-rate in Glasgow was in those years as high as anywhere in the kingdom, and was higher in the nine years from 1831 than in the nine years preceding. The population of Glasgow, says Cowan, had increased on the industrial side, out of proportion to its middle and wealthiest class[363]; and to that he would attribute the higher death-rates in the second period (right-hand side), of the following table:
Glasgow Death-rates.
| 1822-1830 | 1831-1839 | ||||||||||
| Year | Death-rate over all. One in | Death-rate under five. One in | Year | Death-rate over all. One in | Death-rate under five. One in | ||||||
| 1822 | 44·4 | 101 | 1831 | 33·8 | 79 | ||||||
| 1823 | 36·4 | 78 | 1832 | 21·67 | 63 | ||||||
| 1824 | 37·0 | 81 | 1833 | 35·7 | 77 | ||||||
| 1825 | 36·3 | 81 | 1834 | 36·3 | 81 | ||||||
| 1826 | 40·6 | 105 | 1835 | 32·6 | 67 | ||||||
| 1827 | 37·0 | 84 | 1836 | 28·9 | 62 | ||||||
| 1828 | 33·0 | 79 | 1837 | 24·6 | 65 | ||||||
| 1829 | 37·9 | 100 | 1838 | 37·9 | 83 | ||||||
| 1830 | 41·5 | 97 | 1839 | 36·1 | 72 | ||||||
The high death-rates in some of the years in the second column were owing to special causes—Asiatic cholera in 1832, smallpox of children in 1835 and 1836, and to influenza, as well as to typhus, in 1831, 1833 and 1837. As to the fever which prevailed from 1831 to 1836, as it was not relapsing in type, so it was not associated with scarcity.
“The increase of fever in Glasgow,” says Cowan, “during the seven years prior to 1837, had taken place, not in years of famine or distress, but during a period of unexampled prosperity, when every individual able and willing to work was secure of steady and remunerating employment. From the close of 1836, one of those periodical depressions in trade, arising from the state of our monetary system, had visited this city, and deprived a large proportion of the population of the means of subsistence[364].”
It was then that the cases of typhus trebled in number.
The epidemic of fever reached its height in Dundee about the same time as in Glasgow, and in both towns sooner than anywhere else in Scotland or England. One reason of this was the labour-troubles culminating in strikes. In the twelvemonth from 15 June, 1836, to 12 June, 1837, more than three-fourths of all the admissions to the Dundee Infirmary on the medical side were for fever (700 cases). After the wet autumn of 1836 there were a good many cases of dysentery, of which 22 were treated in the infirmary, with two deaths[365].
At Edinburgh, as at Glasgow, there had been an unusual amount of fever in 1831 and 1832, and a steady prevalence of it thereafter. The epidemic of 1836-39 was for the most part typhus of the winter seasons, declining each spring and disappearing each summer, except in the summer of 1836, when many cases came in June, July and August from airy parts of the town[366]. The climax of the epidemic was in 1838, a year later than in Glasgow and Dundee, according to the admissions to the fever-wards of the infirmary[367]:
Admissions for Fever, Edinburgh Infirmary.