A.D. 1750, two earthquakes were experienced in London, the one on the 8th of February, the other a month after, on the 8th of March. The then lord mayor, one alderman, two judges, and the greater part of the jury, with a number of spectators, caught the jail distemper in the month of May at the Old Bailey. About this period, a shock from an earthquake was felt at Philippoli in Romania, by which more than 4000 persons were destroyed. Two years after, in the month of August, 200 mosques and a great part of the city of Adrianople were destroyed by a similar catastrophe.
A.D. 1751, there was an eruption of Vesuvius; famine and pestilence were rife in the kingdoms of Isen and Cordova; the breaking out of the pestilence being attributed to the arrival of mendicants at the ports of Malaga. The year following, a terrific storm was experienced in Charleston, South Carolina, United States, on the 15th of September, during which the town and neighbourhood were inundated, from which there resulted much loss of life and destruction of property. Two years subsequently, there was an eruption of Vesuvius; and on the 15th of July, a severe earthquake was felt in the Morea: it swallowed up many villages and their inhabitants. Constantinople and Grand Cairo suffered from a similar catastrophe on the 2nd of September; two-thirds of their houses were destroyed, and upwards of 40,000 persons. A mortal distemper seized on cattle in England; 30,000 cows were reported to have died of it in Cheshire alone. From this period until 1760, epidemic pestilence prevailed in various parts of the globe; dysentery of a malignant type in the Northern States of America, malignant fever in Normandy, gangrenous sore-throat in Ireland and France, and a petechial fever in Constantinople, which destroyed 150,000 persons. Famine and plague carried off great numbers in Syria, Smyrna, and Cyprus: in the latter place disease destroyed 30,000 victims; Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Damascus also suffered from epidemic pestilence. In the former place (Aleppo) the winter had been severe, and had destroyed all vegetation; the cold was very intense; the mercury in Fahrenheit’s thermometer, exposed in the open air, sunk entirely into the ball of the tube; millions of olive-trees that had hitherto withstood the blast of fifty winters were blighted, and thousands of persons perished from cold. The failure of the crop in the succeeding harvest occasioned a universal famine with all its attendant miseries. In many places the inhabitants were driven to such extremities, that women ate their own children as soon as they had expired in their arms from the want of nourishment; and numbers of persons from the mountains and adjacent villages came daily to Aleppo to offer their wives and children for sale for a few dollars, to procure a temporary subsistence for themselves, and dogs and human creatures might hourly be seen scratching together on the same dunghill, and contending for a bone or a piece of carrion. Pestilence followed closely on the heels of this famine, which lasted till 1758; 60,000 persons were swept away by it in the city and its environs. Vast numbers of horses during this year died in London and in the neighbourhood from a murrain. Yellow fever of extreme malignity swept the West Indian Islands and the coast of Africa, as recorded by Lind, who describes the mortality to have been produced by a pestilential vapour, which arose in the south-east of the Guinea coast, and traversed immense swamps: in several towns, among the negro population, the mortality was so great that there were not sufficient left to bury the dead, and the gates at Cape Coast Castle were shut for the want of sentinels to guard them, the whites suffering equally with the blacks from the fatal scourge. Yellow fever was also rife in the United States of America during this and the following year, especially in New York and Philadelphia. An atrabilious fever raged at Senegal.
A.D. 1755, on the 24th of April, an earthquake was felt in Peru; it destroyed the city of Quito and great numbers of its inhabitants. On the 27th of the following May, the island of Mitylene, in the Archipelago, was destroyed by an earthquake, and about the same period the city of Lisbon was shaken, and 70,000 persons perished in the ruins. Half the island of Madeira was laid waste by an earthquake. This awful commotion extended 5000 miles, even to Scotland.
A.D. 1757, on the 29th of October, an earthquake was felt in the island of Malta: a severe frost was experienced in England during this and the following year; a comet was also visible. About the same time a severe shock of an earthquake was felt in the Azores. The year following, 1759, three comets were seen; an earthquake on the 5th of December destroyed Tripoli, and was as severely felt at Balbec.
A.D. 1760, a violent earthquake occurred on the 30th of October in Syria; it did a great deal of mischief: there was an eruption of Vesuvius. Until this time, extraordinary as it may appear, there was not any such thing as a privy in Madrid: it was customary to throw the ordure out of the windows at night, and it was removed by scavengers the next day. An ordinance having been issued by the king that every householder should build a privy, the people violently opposed it as an arbitrary proceeding, and the physicians remonstrated against it, alleging that the filth absorbed the unwholesome particles of the air, which otherwise would be taken into the human body! His Majesty, however, persisted, but many of the citizens, in order to keep their food wholesome, erected their privies close to their kitchen fireplaces.
During this year the city of Carthagena again suffered from epidemic pestilence, which persisted until 1763; the disease was a tertian fever, which became very virulent during the dog-days, and caused great mortality amongst the inhabitants of that city and the adjoining provinces. The island of Cyprus suffered from plague about this time. It also prevailed generally over the Ottoman empire; Constantinople, Aleppo, Smyrna, Salonica, Broussa, Aden, Antioch, Antab, Killis Ourfah, Diarbekr, Monsol, and many other large towns and villages experienced its severity. Scanderoon, for the first time this century, suffered considerably; the other Frank settlements on the sea-coast of Syria being exempt, with the exception of Tripoli.
A.D. 1761, in the northern parts of the United States of America, severe catarrh or influenza prevailed in the spring; it changed its character to malignant yellow fever during the summer and autumn. This disease was also prevalent in the West Indies. The symptoms were slight cold, followed by extraordinary prostration of strength, laborious respiration, cough, obtuse pains at the precordia and in the chest and limbs. The malady presented the signs of a bilious distemper, the countenance becoming yellow; insensibility or coma, and sometimes delirium, supervened, when the patient was taken off with all the symptoms of a regular bilious plague or yellow fever. About this period a deadly epizootic broke out among the dogs in Madrid; it extended over the entire kingdom: the disease, it would appear, was confined to the canine race, no other kind of domestic animal having suffered from it.
The Paving Act, which may be regarded as a useful sanitary measure, was passed in England. A tremendous shock of an earthquake, attended with volcanic eruptions, was experienced in the Azores in the month of April.
The year following, A.D. 1762, a comet was visible; and on the 9th of February the river Thames rose to a very great height. The heat and drought this year in the United States of America exceeded all the extraordinary seasons hitherto noticed. The inhabitants were greatly distressed for want of water; bilious remittent fever raged in many of the States in the following autumn, especially in Philadelphia. At the Havannah, about the same period, great mortality was occasioned by a similar epidemic. Pestilence also raged in Siam and in Bengal, in Syria, and in various parts of Egypt. The influence of similar seasons was experienced in England and Ireland, and also in France, where pestilence was rife.
The summer of 1763 was moist and sultry; the Indians of Massachusetts and at a place called Martha’s Vineyard in the United States of America were swept away in vast numbers by a yellow or bilious pestilence. An epidemic catarrh called ‘the snuffles’ was very destructive to cattle, especially to horses, in Denmark. Pestilence again prevailed among the canine race at Madrid; the poultry died of it at Genoa, and horned cattle in France, as also in Sweden. This extensive prevalence of epizootic disease indicated a pestilential condition of the atmosphere and a disturbed state of the seasons: the disease first attacked and proved fatal to dumb animals, and afterwards man became its victim: its ravages were attended with great mortality.