Let us look at another disease by the light of recent knowledge, viz., the epidemic influenza, concerning which I remember hearing much talk, as a child, in 1847-48. There has been no epidemic of this disease in the British Isles since 1847, but we may judge of its serious nature from the computation of Peacock that in London alone 250,000 persons were stricken down with it in the space of a few days. It is characteristic of this disease that it invades a whole city, or even a whole country, at "one fell swoop," resembling in its sudden onset and its extent the potato disease which we have been considering.
The mode of its spreading forbids us to attribute it, at least in any material degree, although it may be partially so, to contagion in the ordinary sense, i.e., contagion passing from person to person along the lines of human intercourse. It forbids us also to look at community of water supply or food, or the peculiarities of soil, for the source of the disease virus. We look, naturally, to some atmospheric condition for the explanation. That the atmosphere is the source of the virus is made more likely from the fact that the disease has broken out on board ship in a remarkable way. In 1782, there was an epidemic, and on May 2 in that year, says Sir Thomas Watson—
"Admiral Kempenfelt sailed from Spithead with a squadron, of which the Goliah was one. The crew of that vessel were attacked with influenza on May 29, and the rest were at different times affected; and so many of the men were rendered incapable of duty by this prevailing sickness, that the whole squadron was obliged to return into port about the second week in June, not having had communication with any port, but having cruised solely between Brest and the Lizard. In the beginning of the same month another large squadron sailed, all in perfect health, under Lord Howe's command, for the Dutch coast. Toward the end of the month, just at the time, therefore, when the Goliah became full of the disease, it appeared in the Rippon, the Princess Amelia, and other ships of the last mentioned fleet, although there had been no intercourse with the land."
Similar events were noticed during the epidemic of 1833:
"On April 3, 1833, the very day on which I saw the first two cases that I did see of influenza—all London being smitten with it on that and the following day—the Stag was coming up the Channel, and arrived at two o'clock off Berry Head on the coast of Devonshire, all on board being at that time well. In half an hour afterward, the breeze being easterly and blowing off the land, 40 men were down with the influenza, by six o'clock the number was increased to 60, and by two o'clock the next day to 160. On the self-same evening a regiment on duty at Portsmouth was in a perfectly healthy state, but by the next morning so many of the soldiers of the regiment were affected by the influenza that the garrison duty could not be performed by it."
After reviewing the various hypotheses which had been put forward to account for the disease, sudden thaws, fogs, particular winds, swarms of insects, electrical conditions, ozone, Sir Thomas Watson goes on to say:
"Another hypothesis, more fanciful perhaps at first sight than these, yet quite as easily accommodated to the known facts of the distemper, attributes it to the presence of innumerable minute substances, endowed with vegetable or with animal life, and developed in unusual abundance under specific states of the atmosphere in which they float, and by which they are carried hither and thither."
This hypothesis has certainly more facts in support of it now than it had when Sir Thomas Watson gave utterance to it in 1837. And when another epidemic of influenza occurs, we may look with some confidence to having the hypothesis either refuted or confirmed by those engaged in the systematic study of atmospheric bacteria. Among curious facts in connection with influenza, quoted by Watson, is the following: "During the raging of one epidemic, 300 women engaged in coal dredging at Newcastle, and wading all day in the sea, escaped the complaint." Reading this, the mind naturally turns to Dr. Blackley's glass slide exposed on the shore at Filey, and upon which no pollen was deposited, while eighty pollen grains were deposited on a glass at a higher elevation.
SMALL-POX.
Let us next inquire into the evidence regarding the conveyence of small-pox through the air. In the supplement to the Tenth Report of the Local Government Board for 1880-81 (c. 3,290) is a report by Mr. W.H. Power on the influence of the Fulham, Hospital (for small-pox) on the neighborhood surrounding it. Mr. Power investigated the incidence of small-pox on the neighborhood, both before and after the establishment of the hospital. He found that, in the year included between March, 1876, and March, 1877, before the establishment of the hospital, the incidence of small-pox on houses in Chelsea, Fulham and Kensington amounted to 0.41 per cent. (i.e., that one house out of every 244 was attacked by small-pox in the ordinary way), and that the area inclosed by a circle having a radius of one mile round the spot where the hospital was subsequently established (called in the report the "special area") was, as a matter of fact, rather more free from small-pox than the rest of the district. After the establishment of the hospital in March, 1877, the amount of small-pox in the "special area" round the hospital very notably increased, as is shown by the table by Mr. Power, given below.