87. It passed as one of the healthiest cities in the kingdom, being far

before Shrewsbury and Nottingham, to say nothing of the large towns where the burials exceeded the baptisms. But its moderate death-rate over all, 1 in 42 living, would have been much lower but for the four poor suburban parishes, with a population of 11,211, which had a death-rate of 1 in 35. Haygarth gives a deplorable account of them. The houses were small, close, crowded and dirty, ill supplied with water, undrained, and built on ground that received the sewage from within the walls. The people were ill-fed and they seldom changed or washed their clothes; when they went abroad they were noisome and offensive to the smell. Many of them worked on the large farms around Chester, others at shipbuilding and shipping (Chester had then a considerable foreign trade), others at the mills and markets, others at a nail-factory, while others were employed by the tradesmen within the walls. Fever seems to have been perennial among them, the deaths from typhus having been 23 in 1772, 33 in 1773 and 35 in 1774. “In these poor habitations,” says Haygarth, “when one person is seized with a fever, others of the family are generally affected with the same fever in a greater or less degree.” It became rifer than usual in August, 1773, and attacked 285, proving fatal to 28, or to one in ten. It had the common symptoms of malignant fevers produced by human effluvia, and particularly affected the head with pain, giddiness and delirium. It attacked in general the lowest, few of the middle rank, and none (or only one) of the highest rank[254]. Chester had no manufactures. Its population had grown rapidly of late, as that of Liverpool had grown, the poorer classes being the prolific part of the community; but it had no share in the industrial revolution, it did not employ its women and children in factories, and it was in some respects better than Leeds, Warrington, Manchester, or Carlisle. It is a good illustration of a town growing rapidly without manufactures, and of a community divided by the old walls into two quite distinct sections, a rich and a poor. Such had been the drift of things in England apart from the industrial revolution; but it is the latter which furnishes the best illustrations of a poor prolific populace, of a growing struggle, and of the attendant typhus fever. Fever in the Northern Manufacturing Towns, 1770-1800. The prosperity of the first two-thirds of the 18th century had been attended with a very small increase of population. From 1700 to 1750 the numbers in England are estimated to have grown no more than from about six millions to six millions and a half. The fecundity of many rural parishes was swallowed up by emigration to the American and West Indian colonies, by the army and navy, and by the great waste of life in London and some other towns. The increase was nearly all north of the Trent, while the old weaving towns of the south-west had actually declined. Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wilts were the most crowded counties in 1700. During the next fifty years, the greatest increase was as in the following rough estimate[255]: Increase 1700 1750 per cent. Lancashire 166,200 297,400 78 West Riding of Yorks. 236,700 361,500 52 Warwickshire 96,600 140,000 45 Durham 95,500 135,000 41 Staffordshire 117,200 160,000 36 Gloucestershire 155,200 207,800 34 In the counties where population had increased most, much of the increase was still rural or semi-rural. Defoe describes how the land near Halifax was divided into lots of from two to six or seven acres, hardly a house out of speaking distance from another, at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey or shalloon. Every clothier kept one horse at least, to carry his manufactures to the market, and nearly every one kept a cow, or two or more, for his family. The houses were full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some at the looms, others dressing the cloths, the women and children carding or spinning, being all employed from the youngest to the oldest: not a beggar to be seen, nor an idle person[256]. We have no accounts of the health of this population, except Nettleton’s statistics of smallpox in and around Halifax in 1721 and 1722, given elsewhere, and the “epidemic constitutions” recorded by Wintringham at York during the same period, and by Hillary at Ripon. Before the earliest of the inventions of spinning by machinery, the weavers were gathering to the towns of Yorkshire, Lancashire and other counties north of the Trent. The spinning-jenny of Hargreaves was wrecked by a Blackburn mob in 1768, and a mob wrecked the cotton-mill built by Arkwright at Chorley eleven years later. This was decidedly a time of movement from the country to the towns, a movement which preceded the spinning ingenuity of the sixties and may have been stimulated by the earlier use of the fly-shuttle in weaving. Much of the country round Manchester, though it doubtless retained those farm-houses, hedgerows, and field paths which come into the idyllic opening of ‘Mary Barton’ more than half a century later, was “crowded with houses and inhabitants,” as Percival says: so populous were the environs of Manchester that every house in the township had been found by a late survey to contain an average of six persons. The proportion of deaths was less than in 1757; but that was chiefly due to the accession of new settlers from the country, which raised the ratios of marriages and births[257]. Manchester had increased from a population of about 8000 in 1717 to one of 19,839 (inclusive of Salford) in 1757. When the inhabitants were next counted in 1773, they were found to be 22,481 in Manchester (5317 families in 3402 houses) and 4765 in Salford (1099 families in 866 houses). According to Percival, who gives these figures, the death-rate in 1773 was 1 in 28·4, the births exceeding the deaths by forty in a year. The poor, he says, were now better lodged, and some of the most dangerous malignant distempers were less violent and less mortal. Manchester, however, was still an unhealthy place compared with the country, especially to young children. Thus, the thirty-one townships in the parish of Manchester contained, exclusive of the city, 13,786 inhabitants (2525 families in 2371 houses), and of these only 1 in 56 died annually (compared with 1 in 28 in the city)--the births being to the deaths as 401 to 246 in the year 1772. Again, the bleak upland parish of Darwen with a population in the year 1774 of 1850 souls mostly occupied in the cotton manufacture, had, during the seven years before, more than twice as many baptisms as burials (508 to 233), the birth-rate (1 in 25·5) being high and the death-rate (1 in 56) low. Leeds had a population of some six or seven thousand at the time of the Civil Wars, and lost 1325 in nine months of the year 1645 from plague, all of them the poorer class. A generation or two later, in the time of Thoresby’s ‘Diary,’ it was a centre of the cloth trade; and it appears to have grown steadily throughout the 18th century. In 1775 it had a population of 17,117. We hear from Lucas of an epidemic typhus in it previous to 1779[258]. Eighty persons had died of that fever in one year, and many who struggled through the disease died afterwards of lingering complaints. In two courts or yards (such as might have been the Lantern Yard which Silas Marner found pulled down when he revisited Leeds) forty persons were affected with the fever; some families had received ten shillings a week from the assessment for the poor. As early as 1779 Lucas proposed a house of reception for contagious fever, a proposal which was carried into effect in 1804, after a whole generation of typhus and at a time when there was little fever in Leeds or elsewhere. The infectious fevers, being chiefly confined to the poor, often prevailed, says this writer, for a length of time without exciting much alarm, or without their fatality being attended to; but, he adds about the year 1790, “should a few of the higher rank receive the infection, then the disease is described in most exaggerated terms.” Carlisle was a good instance of the increase of urban population and the breeding of typhus. In seventeen years, from 1763 to 1780, the inhabitants had increased from 4158 to 6229, many of the immigrants being Scots and Irish with their families. The chief industry was the making of calico, in which the women and children were employed as well as the men. When Dr Heysham surveyed the town and suburbs for his census of 1779, he had “opportunity of seeing many scenes of poverty and filth and nastiness[259]”; and in the bill of mortality for that year he confesses himself astonished that there should be so little fever. The great outburst of typhus at Carlisle began in the end of March, 1781, with no very obvious special provocation[260]. Upwards of 600 had typhus to February 7th, 1782, at which date 12 or 15 were still suffering from it. The deaths were less than 1 in 10 of all attacked: viz. 2 in May, 4 in June, 8 in July, 8 in August, 7 in September, 9 in October, 8 in November, 6 in December, and 3 in January, 1782, a total of 55. Of this total of fatal cases, 3 were boys, 4 bachelors, and 15 husbands: 3 girls, 2 maids, 22 wives, and 6 widows. Two-thirds of all the deaths were of married people; Heysham saw no case in a child under three years. It affected about a tenth part of the inhabitants of Carlisle (6299), and raged most among the lower class who lived in narrow, close, confined lanes and in small crowded apartments, of which there were a great many in Carlisle, generally going through all the inmates of a house where it had once begun. On seeking to trace the origin of the epidemic, he found that it began in the end of March, 1781, in a house in Richard-gate, which contained about half-a-dozen very poor families. Every window that could be spared was shut up, to save the window-tax. The surgeon who attended some of these poor wretches told Dr Heysham that the smell was so offensive that it was with difficulty he could stay in the house. One of the typhus patients in this house was a weaver, who, on his recovery, went to the large workshop where he worked, and there, it was supposed, gave the infection (in his clothes) to his fellow workmen, by whom new centres of infection were made in various other houses. In August, a young man just recovered from the fever went to his mother’s in the small village of Rockliffe, four or five miles from Carlisle, to get back his strength in the country air; his mother soon took the fever and died, and a neighbour woman who came to her in her sickness likewise caught it and died. These were all the cases known in the village, and they show the enormously greater fatality of typhus in those not inured to its atmosphere and conditions. The state of population and health at Warrington was peculiar, and is given fully in another chapter. There could be no more striking instance of the growth of what the foreign writers call the proletariat; an old market-town, with a small sail-cloth industry from Elizabethan times, it became a busy weaving town owing to the demand for sail-cloth during the war with the American colonies. The whole population of some 9000 men, women and children, were wage-earners; the women were all the while unusually prolific, and the sacrifice of infant life was enormous, especially by smallpox. We have no particular accounts of fevers; but in the bill of mortality for 1773, the year of a disastrous smallpox epidemic, there were 25 deaths from fever, of which 10 were of “worm fever,” or the remittent of children[261]. By the year 1790, when Ferriar’s accounts of fever in Manchester begin, the industrial revolution had been accomplished, mills were everywhere, and the characteristic hardships and maladies of a prolific working class in a time of slack trade were already much the same as we find them pictured with fidelity and pathos in the pages of Mrs Gaskell half a century after. But, so as not to exaggerate the ill health of the working class in Manchester at the end of the 18th century, let us compare the births with the deaths according to the doubtless imperfect registers[262]: _Manchester, Births and Deaths, 1770-91._ Year Births Deaths 1770 1050 988 1771 1169 993 1772 1127 904 1773 1168 923 1774 1245 958 1775 1359 835 1776 1241 1220 1777 1513 864 1778 1449 975 1779 1464 1288 1780 1566 993 1781 1591 1370 1782 1678 984 1783 1615 1496 1784 1958 1175 1785 1942 1734 1786 2319 1282 1787 2256 1761 1788 2391 1637 1789 2487 1788 1790 2756 1940 1791 2960 2286 The mean lodging-houses in the outskirts of the town, says Ferriar, in 1790[263], were the principal nurseries of febrile contagion: some of these were old houses with very small rooms, into each of which four or more people were crowded to eat, sleep, and frequently to work. They commonly bore marks of a long accumulation of filth, and some of them had been scarcely free from infection for many years past. As soon as one poor creature dies or is driven out of his cell he is replaced by another, generally from the country, who soon feels in his turn the consequences of breathing infected air. There was hardly any ventilation possible, many of these old houses being in dark narrow courts or blind alleys. In other parts of the town the lodging-houses were new, and not yet thoroughly dirty; but in these there was a long garret under the tiles, in which eight or ten people often lodged, the beds almost touching. Again, many lived in cellars, sleeping on the damp floor with few or no bedclothes; the cellars of Manchester, however, were better ventilated than those of Edinburgh, and freer from fever. These cellar-tenants were subject to the constant action of depressing passions of the mind. “I have seen patients,” says Ferriar, “in agonies of despair on finding themselves overwhelmed with filth and abandoned by everyone who could do them any service, and after such emotions I have seldom found them recover.” Addressing the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester previous to 1792, he pointed out in an _argumentum ad hominem_ that “the situation of the poor at present is extremely dangerous, and often destructive to the middle and higher ranks of society[264].” And again, “the poor are indeed the first sufferers, but the mischief does not always rest with them. By secret avenues it reaches the most opulent, and severely revenges their neglect or insensibility to the wretchedness surrounding them[265].” In an address to the Committee of Police in Manchester, he instances the following cases: A family of the name of Turner in a dark cellar behind Jackson’s Row: they have been almost constantly patients of the Infirmary for three years past on account of disorders owing to their miserable dwelling. There are other instances of the same kind in Bootle Street. In Blakely Street, under No. 4, is a range of cellars let out to lodgers, which threatens to become a nursery of disease. They consist of four rooms communicating with each other, of which the two centre rooms are completely dark; the fourth is very ill-lighted and chiefly ventilated through the others. They contain four or five beds in each, and are already extraordinarily dirty. In a nest of lodging-houses in Brook’s entry near the bottom of Longmill-gate, a very dangerous fever constantly subsists, and has subsisted for a considerable number of years. He had known nine patients confined in fevers at the same time in one of those houses and crammed into three small dirty rooms without the regular attendance of any friend or of a nurse. Four of these poor creatures died, absolutely from want of the common offices of humanity and from neglect in the administration of their medicines. Another set of lodging-houses constantly infected is known by the name of the Five Houses, in Newton Street[266]. The fever in Manchester was not always malignant typhus: sometimes it had the symptoms and low rate of mortality that suggest relapsing fever. Thus, in the winter epidemic of 1789-90, very prevalent in Manchester and Salford, out of Ferriar’s first ninety patients only two died; in some the skin had a remarkable, pungent heat, in others there were profuse watery sweats; women were commonly affected with hysterical symptoms during convalescence, which was often tedious[267]. A certain number of these cases would run into “a formed typhus,” with petechiae and all the other signs of malignity; and in some seasons, as in the distressful year 1794, typhus was the usual form. Two fatal cases in children, examined after death, had peritonitis; “in the one no marks of the disease were discernible within the cavity of the [intestinal] tube;” in the other, the patient was covered with petechiae[268]. These cases of localized inflammation in typhus he compares with Pringle’s cases of spotted fever complicated with abscess of the brain. The years 1792 and 1793 passed, says Ferriar, without any extraordinary increase of fever patients, although the noxious influences were always present. But in the summer and autumn of 1794 “the usual epidemic fever” became very prevalent among the poor in some quarters of the town, particularly after a bilious colic had raged among all ranks of people. This was a time when work was slack; many workmen enlisted and left their families. In November and December 1794, as many as 156 sent applications to the Infirmary in a week to be visited in fever at their homes. This was a memorable time of scarcity and distress all over the country, the beginning of a twenty-years’ period of so-called “war-prices,” when farmers’ profits were so large that they could afford to double or treble their rents to the landlords. The history of epidemics comes at this point into close contact with the economic history, which I shall touch on in the sequel, after giving a few more particulars of typhus in England and Scotland generally, previous to the outbreak of the war with France in 1793. Typhus in England and Scotland generally, in the end of the 18th century. The introduction of machinery and the building of mills brought typhus fever to places much less crowded than Leeds, or Manchester, or Carlisle. Dr David Campbell of Lancaster saw much of typhus in that town, and in mill villages near it, in the years 1782, 1783, and 1784. In Lancaster town he saw about 500 cases, of which 168 were in men, with 20 deaths, 236 in women, with 11 deaths, and 94 in children under fourteen, with 3 deaths. At Backbarrow cotton mill, twenty miles from Lancaster, there were 180 cases, of which 38 were in men, with 5 deaths, 11 in women, with 2 deaths, and 131 in children under fourteen, with no deaths[269]. At this mill there was an extremely offensive smell in the rooms, which came from the privy; the doors of the latter, “for indispensable reasons in the economy of these works, where so many children are employed, always communicate with the workrooms.” Every care had been taken to keep the air sweet, but without effect. The offensive smell was in all the cotton mills from the same cause; and in the Radcliffe mill belonging to Mr Peel, the typhus was ascribed to that source, the nuisance having been at length got rid of. Both at Backbarrow and Radcliffe the houses of the workpeople were new, airy and comfortable. In the same years typhus raged with uncommon severity at Ulverston and in various parts of Lancashire, where cotton-mills had been set up[270]. The typhus of Liverpool and Newcastle was reproduced in Whitehaven and Cockermouth on a scale proportionate to their size. Whitehaven, the port of the Cumberland coal-field, was the Newcastle of the west coast, and had a large trade with Ireland. Many of the labourers lived in cellars. Brownrigg’s experiences of typhus fever in it went back to near the middle of the 18th century. The Whitehaven Dispensary was opened in 1783, the occasion for it being thus explained:-- “Previous to the establishment of dispensaries Whitehaven and Cockermouth were infested by nervous and putrid fever. Many of their respectable inhabitants became its victims; and among the lower class of people it prevailed with deplorable malignancy. The present period happily exhibits a different picture. Notwithstanding our connection with the metropolis of Ireland, and other commercial places, contagion rarely appears; or, when accidentally introduced, is readily suppressed[271].” The following is the abstract of “contagious fever cases” from the records of the Whitehaven Dispensary from 30 June, 1783, to 9 June, 1800[272]: Year Cured Dead Total 1783 75 1 76 1784 401 9 410 1785 350 20 370 1786 91 6 97 1787 21 1 22 1788 53 7 60 1789 103 2 105 1790 288 21 309 1791 74 6 79 1792 17 2 19 1793 7 3 10 1794 13 1 14 1795 28 2 30 1796 48 1 49 1797 35 2 37 1798 12 1 13 1799 11 1 12 ---- --- ---- Total 1627 85 1712 The year 1790 is indicated as an unhealthy one, by the excess of burials over christenings, also at Macclesfield, where there were 316 christenings to 380 burials, the proportion being usually the other way[273]. Dr John Alderson of Hull wrote in 1788 an essay on the contagion of fever, in which there are no authentic details for Hull: “The calamity itself is the constant complaint of every neighbourhood, and almost every newspaper presents us with an example of the direful consequences of infection”--the reference being to gaols more particularly[274]. Whatever was the reason, there was undoubtedly a great deal of typhus in England in the eighties of the eighteenth century. Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire experienced much typhus from 1782 to 1785, although we have few particulars. “The remembrance of its ravages at Gloucester, Worcester and Marlborough,” says Dr Wall of Oxford, “is still fresh in every mind, where its virulence proved so peculiarly fatal to the medical world.” At Aylesbury, Dr Kennedy survived an attack of the “contagious fever,” to write an account (1785) of the epidemic, which he traced to the gaol (the date, be it observed, is subsequent to Howard’s visitations)[275]. At Maidstone, also, in 1785, the gaol fever was the subject of a special account[276]. At Worcester in 1783 the younger Dr Johnstone caught typhus while visiting the gaol, which was thereafter rebuilt at great expense. A prisoner took it to Droitwich where 14 died[277]. Dr Wall gives clinical details of fifteen cases of typhus treated by him in private practice at Oxford in 1785; one of his patients was an apothecary whose business had exposed him very much to the influence of contagion, as he was much employed amongst the poor in the suburbs of the town and neighbouring villages and in the House of Industry[278]. In the year 1783-85, much of the epidemic fever was of the nature of ague, as described in another chapter. It is not always easy to separate it from typhus; but there is no doubt that both were prevalent together. Thus in the parish of Painswick, Gloucestershire, in the spring of 1785 there occurred both “a contagious fever” and an “epidemic ague,” the latter having left a good many persons dropsical and cachectic[279]. This had been part of an epidemical fever which had raged for some time in the county of Gloucestershire, and is said to have lately carried off a great number of poor. At Norton, within five miles of Gloucester, there lived in two adjoining tenements two families: in one a man and his wife and three children, in the other a man and his wife, of whom only one remained alive on the 1st of March, 1785[280]. The extraordinary failure of the harvest in Scotland in 1782 produced much distress, and with it fever, in the winter following. The Glasgow and Edinburgh municipalities imported grain for the public benefit. Various traces of the scarcity and fever appear in the Statistical Account written a few years after. Thus, in Holywood parish, Dumfriesshire, some fevers were wont to appear in February and March among people of low circumstances living in a narrow valley; and the unusual mortality in the dear year 1782 was owing to an infectious fever in the same cottages. In the regular bills of mortality of Torthorwald parish, Dumfriesshire, the deaths from “fever” fall in the dear years, 1782-3, 1785, &c. In Dunscore parish, in the same county, the burials of 1782 rose to the most unusual figure of 30 (the baptisms being 17), “owing to a malignant fever[281].” But Scotland was now past the danger of actual famine from even a total failure of the harvest. Some farmers were ruined, and many more were unable to pay the year’s rent; but the very poorest were enabled to find food, one source being “the importation of white pease from America.” From Delting, in Shetland, one of the poorest parishes, the report is: “There is reason to believe that none died from mere want; but there is no doubt that many, from the unwholesome food, contracted diseases that brought them to their graves.” The following relating to the parishes of Keithhall and Kinkell, Aberdeenshire, in the scarcity following the lost harvest of 1782, is a curiously detailed glimpse of the time: “Several families who would not allow their poverty to be known lived on two diets of meal a day. One family wanted food from Friday night till Sunday at dinner. On the last Friday of December, 1782, the country people could get no meal in Aberdeen, as the citizens were afraid of a famine; and a poor man, in this district, could find none in the country the day after. But the distress of this family being discovered, they were supplied. Next day the [Kirk] session bought at a sale a considerable quantity of bere, which was made into meal. This served the poor people until the importation at Aberdeen became regular, and every man of humanity rejoiced that the danger of famine was removed[282].” We hear most of fevers in the Highland parishes, with their subdivisions of holdings and an excess of population. Thus of Gairloch, Ross-shire, it is said: “Fevers are frequent, sometimes they are of a favourable kind, at other times they continue long and carry off great numbers”--the poor in this parish, upon the Kirk Session roll, numbering 84 in the year 1792, and the aggregate money paid to the whole number averaging £6. 7_s._ in a year, whereas the fertile parish of Ellon, Aberdeenshire, with 40 on the poor’s roll, paid them £43 per annum. Again, of the fishing village of Eyemouth, it is said: “The only complaints that prove mortal in this place are different kinds of fevers and consumptions; and these are mostly confined to the poorest class of people, and ascribed to their scanty diet.” And of another fishing parish, in Banffshire, Fordyce, including Portsoy, it is said: “The most prevalent distemper is a fever, and that for the most part not universal, but confined to particular districts. It is sometimes thought to arise from infection and communication with other parts of the country; at other times from local situations and circumstances of the people’s houses and habits of living in particular districts[283].” The beginning of the great French war was the occasion of a considerable increase of fever; although no records make it appear so fatal a time as the years 1783-86. The commercial distress and want of work which began in the autumn of 1792, were intensified by the bad harvests of 1794 and 1795, which followed two harvests also deficient. This was the period of distress and of epidemic fever to which Wordsworth referred in the passage in the first book of the ‘Excursion,’ where he is relating the story of Margaret’s ruined cottage[284]. There is little medical writing upon the epidemic fever of 1794-95; and, in the very district of Wordsworth’s story, the records of the Whitehaven Dispensary bear no traces of a great concourse of patients. There is reason to think that the fever, if slow and weakening, was seldom fatal, that it was _typhus mitior_, and that it was sometimes, perhaps often, relapsing. One glimpse we get of it in the family of the afterwards celebrated Dr Edward Jenner of Berkeley, in the winter of 1794-95. He thus writes to a friend about the visitation of “grim-visaged typhus:” “You shall hear the history of our calamities. First fell Henry’s [his nephew and assistant] wife and sister. From the early use of bark, they both appeared to recover; but the former, after going about her ordinary business for some days, had a dreadful relapse which nearly destroyed her. It was during my attendance on this case that the venomed arrow wounded me.... Like Mrs Jenner’s fever, at an early period there was a clear intermission for four days.... On the eighth day after the first seizure it again set in, in good earnest, and continued one-and-twenty days.... Dr Parry was with me from Bath five times, Dr Hicks and Dr Ludlow as many, and my friend George was never absent from my bedside.... But, to return to that mansion of melancholy, Henry’s. His infant girl has now the fever; a servant maid in the house is dying with it; and to complete this tragical narrative, about five days ago fell poor Henry himself. His symptoms at present are such as one might expect: violent pain in the head, vertigo, debility, transient shiverings.... His pulse this evening is sunk from 125 to 100. The stench from the poor girl is so great as to fill the house with putrid vapour; and I shall remove him this morning by means of a sedan-chair to a cottage near my own house[285].” This is a tolerably clear picture of a short-period fever with relapses, or of relapsing fever strictly so-called; the stench, also, of one patient is characteristic. Barker, of Coleshill or Birmingham, has much to say under the same year 1794, of a slow, tedious fever, marked by “sluggish action and comatose symptoms,” and much subject to relapses; but he does not give the duration of the first or subsequent paroxysms, as Jenner does, or the usual length of the clear intervals, his most definite case being of a young woman who died in twenty-four hours from a relapse which came on about three weeks after the fever had left her[286]. It was the access of fever in 1794-5, and the alarm that it caused among the richer classes, that led to the opening of the Manchester House of Recovery in 1796. In certain streets in the neighbourhood chosen for the hospital, Portland Street, Silver Street and others in the same block, the cases of contagious fever for nearly three years before the hospital was opened are given by Ferriar as follows: Sept. 1793 to Sept. 1794, cases of fever, 400 Sept. 1794 to Sept. 1795, " " " 389 Sept. 1795 to May 1796, " " " 267 The cases began to be sent to the hospital on the 27th May, 1796, and an attempt was made to extinguish contagion in the houses, by white-washing, disinfecting and the like; so that in the same group of streets there were only 25 cases of fever from 13 July, 1794 to 13 March, 1797. Meanwhile the admissions to the hospital were few until the dearth of 1799-1802. One of the manufacturing towns which is known to have shared in the epidemic fever of 1794-96 was Ashton-under-Lyne, where upwards of three hundred cases (with few deaths) occurred in less than three months at the end of