Year Cases
1831 758
1832 1394
1833 878
1834 690
1835 826
1836 652
1837 1224
1838 2244
1839 1235
1840 782

At Aberdeen the epidemic appears to have been later even than at Edinburgh, if the following admissions to one of the two fever-wards (Dr Kilgour’s) may be taken as a fair measure of it[368]:

Admissions for Fever, Aberdeen.

Year Cases Deaths
1838 (March to December) 189 26
1839 286 29
1840 534 53

In all these large towns of Scotland, the fever was purely typhus. The various observers all describe the fever as of the spotted kind, the proportion of cases with spots varying somewhat.

Thus, at Glasgow Infirmary, from 1835 to 1839, there were 4202 cases with eruption, 1270 without eruption, and 143 doubtful. And, that the cases without eruption were not cases of enteric or typhoid, is probable from the record kept of the fatalities in Dr Anderson’s fever-wards[369]:

In1885cases with eruption,275deaths, or14·58per cent.
"324cases without eruption,11deaths, or3·33per cent.
"143cases doubtful,7deaths, or4·89per cent.

At Aberdeen, Kilgour counted 59 cases spotted in a total of 189 in 1838, 96 in a total of 286 in 1839, and 278 in a total of 534 in 1840, all the cases, whether spotted or not, being of the same fever, which he considered an exanthematous malady as a whole. Of 169 cases tabulated by Craigie at Edinburgh, from 28 June, 1836, to 12 February, 1837, there were 79 with an eruption, which was usually the mottled or rubeoloid rash.

The fatalities were relatively more in Edinburgh than in Dundee, comparing two periods which were not the same. Of 700 cases at Dundee, from June, 1836, to June, 1837, only 50 died, or 1 in 14, notwithstanding a good many complications from chest complaints and bowel complaints[370]. At Edinburgh during fifteen months of 1838-39, there died 276 in 2037 cases, or 1 in 7·3; of those cases, 1075 were in females, with 116 deaths, or 1 in 9, and 962 males, with 160 deaths, or 1 in 6[371]. The most common age for the fever at Dundee was from twenty to forty years (416 out of 700 cases, with 26 deaths, or 1 in 16), while the most fatal age, as usual, was from forty to sixty years, at which one person died of three attacked. At Aberdeen, in the last year of the epidemic, the years of life from ten to twenty had more cases (233 in a total of 657) than any other decade of life. The average stay of a patient in the Aberdeen fever-wards was 18·67 days. The great preponderance of deaths in adolescents or adults was clearly shown in the Glasgow fever-statistics, 1835-39.

Deaths from
typhus fever
Under
ten years
Over
ten years
Fever-deaths per cent.
of deaths from
all causes
4788 752 4036 11·57