Rome full of fevers is frightful with the seeds of death;
Roman fevers are faithful by their lasting course,
When they once invade, seldom quit the living man.”
If the site of Rome with its other concomitants be considered, we shall readily understand why pestilences were there so rife. It is situated in a level country on the low banks of the Tiber, surrounded by the extensive Ostiensian and Pontine marshes, exposed to the powerful rays of the sun, and subject to inundations and other commotions of the elements; further the inhabitants having been constantly engaged in war, did not cultivate their lands sufficiently to produce food for half the population, nor had they any established commercial intercourse with other countries, from which they could be supplied in times of scarcity. From their perpetual inroads agriculture was also interrupted among all the adjoining nations, and the far-famed Romans were often reduced to the necessity of feeding upon grass, leaves, and unwholesome roots, or of consuming the provender stored for their cattle, till men and beasts, and, it is said, birds and fish, perished together, so pestilential were the seasons; “vulgato per omne genus animalium morbo.”
I might go on multiplying authorities ad infinitum to show that previously to the middle of the seventeenth century those ages were full of physical and political miseries, sufficient to account for the frequent outbreak of fatal maladies; and we shall also find that subsequently to that period all those countries that have adopted judicious regulations in the construction of their dwellings, in widening their streets, improving the drainage, and securing an adequate supply of the three grand essentials to vitality,—light, air, and water, have proportionately experienced a corresponding immunity from pestilence, a notable exemplification of which we have in this our own country, although we are far, very far, in this the nineteenth century, from the improved condition that our wealth and the repeated warnings of disease which have been vouchsafed us, especially since the year 1832,—now nearly twenty years,—should have given rise to.
It was not, however, until after the great fire in 1666, at the rebuilding of London, as it were, that any measures were taken to secure the public health. In the year 1665, during the time of the great and terrible plague, our streets were narrow, and the houses, which were built of wood, closed inwards towards each other, one story projecting considerably above the other, till they seemed almost to touch each other at the top, and looking upwards from the street towards the sky was very like looking up from the bottom of a well. There were scarcely any sewers; the streets were damp and wet, and nearly everything in the shape of offal was thrown into them, while certain corporate bodies, the ecclesiastical authorities even, contended stoutly for the right of sending their swine into the streets to feed upon such garbage as they found plentifully therein. It would also appear that the general habits of the citizens in no way counteracted the bad effects of their faulty architecture by domestic cleanliness.
The celebrated Erasmus asserts that the interior of the dwellings in London was disgusting to the last degree. He plainly ascribed ‘the sweating sickness,’ which was a species of plague, to the incommodious form and bad position of the houses, the filthiness of the streets, and the sluttishness within doors. In a letter to a physician of Cardinal Wolsey’s, in which he gives an account of the domestic habits of our countrymen in those days, he says, “There is a degree of uncleanliness, and even of filth, pourtrayed, of which we can have no conception in our times.” He continues: “The floors are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, which were occasionally removed, but underneath lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments of fish, spittle, the excrements of dogs, cats, and everything that was nasty.” Hentzer observes, that even the floor of the presence-chamber of the Queen Elizabeth, in Greenwich Palace, “was covered with hay after the English fashion;” and Hume remarks, as a proof of the meanness of living in those days, “that the comptroller of the household of Edward the Sixth paid only 30s. a year for his house in Channel Row, which like the generality of the streets of London was unpaved and undrained, and contained an accumulation of the offal and such filth as was habitually thrown into them.”
Sydenham, who writes of the changes produced in the amount of disease according to locality, the constitutions of the seasons, &c., notices that London in his day was ill-built, ill-drained, ill-supplied with water, and the neighbouring country to the very suburbs so badly cleared, as to subject the inhabitants to a return of agues regularly in spring and autumn; and in the journal of De Foe we have assigned as one of the many causes of the pestilence that occurred in this country in 1665, the crowded state of the city and suburbs, which were prodigiously full in consequence of the disbanding of the armies after the restoration of the royal family and of the monarchy. Our city, says De Foe, was computed to have had in it 100,000 inhabitants more than it ever entertained before; some computed the number as being twice as many, so that pestilence became in one year (1665) more terribly destructive from the immense numbers crowded together, aided by peculiar elemental disturbances, which had been rife for several years previously; pestilence indeed may be said to have existed in London continuously from the year 1661 unto 1666.
In the year 1665 the terrible plague became aggravated in the month of July, from the sultriness of the atmosphere, cold nocturnal dews or damp fogs, frequent cold showers and cold winds alternating with the warmth and dryness of the air; in short, every extreme vicissitude seemed to exist in that dismal period of disease and death, producing agues, bilious disorders, bowel complaints, &c. In the next month the great general pestilence appeared to swallow up as it were all previous diseases in one common destruction. Indeed, from the month of August all other diseases were absorbed in the pestilence: all distempers, commencing in their usual form, were uniformly resolved into the deadly plague; and in the month of September, says the great historian, “Death rode triumphant among the devoted inhabitants of London; having borrowed the fatal scythe of Time, he mowed down the people like grass, and immerged the poor remains in horror and despair.”
Having advanced thus much in support of the natural causes of universal distempers or epidemic pestilences, culled from the histories of pestilences from the earliest ages, we arrive at the consideration of that ‘vexata quæstio,’—contagion.