The Common Nature of Epidemics, and their relation to climate and civilization

by Southwood Smith

Scarcely a third part of the area of the kingdom was under cultivation. The remainder consisted of moor, forest, and fen. Vast tracts were under water during the greater part of the year, and at other times formed morasses, marshes, and swamps.

Immediately beyond the walls that encompassed the towns were large stagnant ditches, which being the nearest receptacles for refuse, were full of all sorts of decomposing filth.

The streets were narrow, unpaved, undrained, uncleansed, and unlighted. There was no provision for the removal of the town refuse. Gutters were formed at the sides of the streets, as in Bethnal Green and the neglected parts of all our towns at the present time, into which the inhabitants threw the refuse of their houses; forming in dry weather a semi-fluid mass of corrupting animal and vegetable matter, and in rainy weather black turbid rivulets which ultimately poured their contents into some water-course.

The houses were mean and squalid, built of wood and wattles, thatched with straw, without chimneys, the windows without glass, the floors without boards, the furniture of the rudest description; the use of linen was scarcely known; common straw formed the king’s bed. “The floors,” says Erasmus, writing two centuries later, “generally are made of nothing but loam, and are strewed with rushes, which being constantly put on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases for twenty years; with fish bones, broken victuals, the dregs of tankards, and impregnated with other filth underneath, from dogs and men.” Contemporary writers concur in representing the offensive odour of decaying straw and rushes as universal in the houses.

There was no knowledge of the art of collecting, preserving, and storing fodder. The animals for winter food were slaughtered in autumn, and their flesh salted or smoked. It was only during three months of the year, from Midsummer to Michaelmas, that any fresh animal food, excepting game and river fish, was tasted even by the nobles of the land. The common people subsisted chiefly on salted beef, veal, and pork, the price of which was one-half less than that of wheat in the time of Henry VIII.

There were no fresh vegetables. As late as the 18th century salads were sent from Holland for the table of Queen Caroline. Sir John Pringle, writing in the middle of the last century, states that his father’s gardener told him that in the time of his grandfather cabbages were sold for a crown a-piece. It was not until towards the close of the 16th century (1585) that the potato was first brought to England, where it was limited to the garden for at least a century and a half after it had been planted by Sir Walter Raleigh in his own garden. It was first cultivated as a field crop in Scotland so recently as the year 1752.

For many centuries England remained in the condition of country in which no more subsistence is produced than is barely sufficient for the necessities of the people. Consequently every year of scarcity became a year of famine, and such years, about one in ten, occurred for ages with great regularity, and often equalled in their terrible results the worst famines of antiquity.

In a cold climate fuel is nearly as important as food, for which indeed it is a substitute. A large portion of our daily food is used up in supporting that internal fire by which the heat of the human body in every climate, and under every variety of external temperature, is maintained at the 98th degree of Fahrenheit. The greater the loss of heat by cooling, the greater the amount of heat which the body itself must generate to maintain its temperature at this elevated point. This demand for additional heat cannot be supplied without additional quantities of food, and unless these supplies are afforded, the substance of the body itself, its very tissues and organs, are consumed; a process which cannot be continued long without exhaustion, disease, and death. The phrase “starved by cold” expresses a more literal fact than is commonly understood. Unhappily the circumstances which deprive a population of the means of counteracting cold limit also the supplies of food at their command, and the pressure of the twofold privation, want of food and want of fuel, commonly occurs at the very season when both these indispensable supports of life are most needed. Some conception may be formed of the suffering to which our ancestors were exposed from this cause, from the fact that their prejudice against the use of coal as an article of fuel was such that a law was passed rendering it a capital offence to burn it within the City, and there is a record in the Tower importing that a person was tried, convicted, and executed for this offence in the reign of Edward the First. It was not until the reign of Charles the First that there was a regular supply of coals to London.

The habits of the people increased the force of these privations. Intemperance was a national vice. Excessive carousing at home, or days and nights spent in taverns, was the usual practice among all classes, and the physical and moral evils resulting from the custom were neither redeemed nor lessened by the epithet which these habitual convivialities appear to have conferred upon the nation of “Merrie England.” Caius, indeed, one of the most celebrated physicians of the sixteenth century, couples Germany and the Netherlands with England in this common reproach. “These three nations,” he says, “destroy more meats and drynkes without all order, convenient time, reason, and necessitie, than all other countries under the son, to the great annoyance of their bodies and wittes.”

This condition of the country and this mode of life themselves constitute the most powerful causes of epidemics; and an extraordinary concurrence and concentration of these causes are manifested in the combination of the circumstances which have been enumerated, namely, in the malarious state of the greater part of the kingdom, in the confined space of the towns, in the deficiency and putrescency of the food, in the inadequacy of the means of protection from cold, and in the intemperance of the people. These were the true sources of the malignity and mortality of the pestilences of that age.