Abstract
In the middle of the eighteenth century, works by such authors as George Cheyne, Herman Boerhaave, John Baker and John Huxham expressed the mainstream view that nearly all acute diseases stemmed from physiological dysfunctions and were often triggered by the qualities of the environment, especially weather and diet. In 1745, however, a severe epidemic of rinderpest, a disease of cattle, inspired a revival of contagionism. Two contagionist treatises appeared in 1748: one, by Richard Davies, was forgotten; the other, by John Fothergill, on streptococcal sore throat, became a landmark. Finally, there was another significant mid-century innovation: the first dispensary to offer home visiting to patients, founded by the Methodist leader John Wesley. Over the next generation, small droplets of contagionist ideas would become a steady stream.
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Notes
- 1.
The (ancient) Methodists who adapted Epicurean atomism to medicine were also influential. Unlike the Galenists, who adopted a quaternary system based on four elements, the Methodists developed a binary system based on the constriction (or tension) and relaxation of the body’s pores. Echoes appear in many eighteenth-century works, including Cullen’s Theory of Excitement. See Henry Cohen (Lord Cohen of Birkenhead), “The Evolution of the Concept of Disease,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Medicine (1953) 48, no. 3:155–60; Charles Greene Cumston, The History of Medicine (New York: 1926, rpt 1987), 124–52.
- 2.
Helen Dingwall, Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries: Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh (East Lothian, UK: 1995), 102–8; E. Ashworth Underwood, Boerhaave’s Men at Leyden and After (Edinburgh: 1977), 60; Lisa Rosner, Medical Education in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh: 1991), 73–81. See also Samuel Ferris, A General View of the Establishment of Physic as a Science in England, by the Incorporation of the College of Physicians, London (London: 1795).
- 3.
Ferris, General View, prefatory address, vi–vii. The content of medical instruction at Oxford and Cambridge (to the extent that there was any) is elusive because it was usually taught privately within each college. See Arthur Rook, “Medicine at Cambridge, 1660–1760,” Medical History (1969) 13:107–22.
- 4.
L. J. Rather, Addison and the White Corpuscles: An Aspect of Nineteenth-Century Biology (London: 1972), n. 4, 36–7. See also John B. West, “Marcello Malpighi and the Discovery of the Pulmonary Capillaries and Alveoli,” American Journal of Physiology—Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology (2013) 304: L383-L390, doi:10.1152/ajplung.00016.2013.
- 5.
Christopher Hamlin, More than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Baltimore: 2014), 69–73. In 2015 the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter announced a project on “Santorio Santorio and the Emergence of Quantifying Procedures in Medicine at the end of the Renaissance: Problems, Context, Ideas.” See http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/medicalhistory/projects/santoriosantorio/.
- 6.
E. T. Renbourn, “The Natural History of Insensible Perspiration: A Forgotten Doctrine of Health and Disease,” Medical History (1960) 4:135–52.
- 7.
See Anita Guerrini, “The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne and their Circle,” Journal of British Studies (1986) 25:288–311; Guerrini, “Scots in London Medicine in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Stana Nenadic (Lewisburg, PA: 2010), 165–85; John Friesen, “Archibald Pitcairne, David Gregory and the Scottish Origins of English Tory Newtonianism, 1688–1715,” History of Science (2003) 41:163–91. Pitcairne saw mathematics as a bulwark against political and religious sectarianism and fundamentalism. Eric Greer Casteel argues that Pitcairne thought mathematics trumped the medical theories of both Hippocrates and Descartes: “Entrepot and Backwater: A Cultural History of the Transfer of Medical Knowledge from Leiden to Edinburgh, 1690–1740,” PhD dissertation (University of California, Los Angeles: 2007), 98–110.
- 8.
George Cheyne, A New Theory of Continual Fevers…Mechanically Explain’d (London: 1701), online from ECCO. See also Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman OK: 2000), 57–9.
- 9.
Cheyne, Continual Fevers, 27.
- 10.
Cheyne, Continual Fevers, 32. He cites Borelli in support of his view.
- 11.
Theophilus Lobb, Rational Methods of Curing Fevers (London: 1734), online from Google, see esp. 254.
- 12.
Lobb, Rational Methods, 125.
- 13.
Lobb, Rational Methods, 137. For the non-naturals, see Heikki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: 1999) and Louise Hill Curth, “The Medical Content of English Almanacs 1640–1700,” JHMAS (2005) 60:255–82, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jri041.
- 14.
Lobb, Rational Methods, 194.
- 15.
Theophilus Lobb, Letters relating to the Plague and other Contagious Distempers (London: 1745). This included a letter about rinderpest.
- 16.
The standard biography is G. A. Lindeboom, Herman Boerhaave; the Man and His Work (London: 1968). I used this edition but a second edition has an updated bibliography (Rotterdam: 2007). See also Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician (Amsterdam: 2002).
- 17.
Lester King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1958), chapter 3 “Hermann Boerhaave, Systematist,” and chapter 4, “Hermann Boerhaave, Scientist,” 59–121; C.J. Lawrence, “Early Edinburgh Medical Theory and Practice,” in The Early Years of the Edinburgh Medical School, ed. R. G. W. Anderson and A. D. C. Simpson (Edinburgh, 1976), 81–94, esp. 81–5. See also John C. Powers, “Chemistry without Principles: Herman Boerhaave on Instruments and Elements,” in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry: Contributions from the First Francis Bacon Workshop, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Dordrecht: 2007), 23–43. Powers shows how Boerhaave adapted Boyle’s corpuscular model of matter but translated the classical four “elements” (earth, air, fire and water) into four “instruments” that helped reveal the nature of substances.
- 18.
R. W. Innes Smith, English-Speaking Students of Medicine at the University of Leyden (Edinburgh: 1932); Underwood, Boerhaave’s Men. Underwood 149 and 126–7 lists 45 of Boerhaave’s students who became FRSs; 28 who became fellows of the London College of Physicians; 27 who became licentiates or extra-licentiates; and 4 who became president: James Jurin, William Wasey, Thomas Reeve and William Pitcairn.
- 19.
Cullen left Glasgow for Edinburgh in 1755 to teach chemistry with the ailing Andrew Plummer, who died the following year. He began clinical lectures at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in about 1757. He taught materia medica in 1760–1 and began teaching the theory of medicine in 1766. W. F. Bynum, “Cullen, William (1710–1790),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6874. See also John Thomson et al., An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen, M.D. 1:118–19, quoting Cullen, 1783–4. Volume 1 appeared in 1832. Volume 2, revised by Allen Thomson and others, appeared in 1859. The complex history of this work is reviewed by Jeff Wolf, “ ‘Our Master and Father at the Head of Physick’: The Learned Medicine of William Cullen,” (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh: 2015), 22–41, online at https://www.createspace.com/6292898.
- 20.
Knoeff, Boerhaave, 206. An outline of Boerhaave’s implicit taxonomy is in the Appendix.
- 21.
King, Medical World, 79. See also Boerhaave’s Aphorisms: Concerning the Knowledge and Cure of Diseases. Translated from the Last Edition Printed in Latin at Leyden, 1715…by J. Delacoste, M.D. (London: 1725), online from ECCO. This was the first English edition of the Aphorisms (first published in Latin in 1709) and followed Joseph Browne’s translation of Boerhaave’s Institutions in Physick (London, 1714). I prefer this to Van Swieten’s Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms, which appeared in five volumes (in Latin) beginning in 1742 and ending only in 1772 (a posthumous index appeared as volume 6 in 1776), long after Boerhaave’s influence in England had peaked.
- 22.
There was an important clinical insight in this theory. The fatal outcome of several common diseases (including malaria) and infections (sepsis) does result from disordered blood, blood clots and/or leaks.
- 23.
See, for example, Knoeff, Boerhaave,192 and 206, and Casteel, “Entrepot and Backwater,”175.
- 24.
Lindeboom, Boerhaave, 294. He also palpated his patients, used a magnifying glass and microscope in examinations, and performed autopsies himself.
- 25.
Lindeboom, Boerhaave, writes that Boerhaave was very skilled in therapeutics. He usually began with regimen and his use of drugs was “simple, but nevertheless very careful,” 298.
- 26.
This physiological approach to illness never went away but it moved from acute diseases to chronic ones. Today, physicians still speak of conditions such as high blood pressure as if they were separate diseases and resort first to constitutional remedies, such as diet and exercise. They usually do not attribute such problems to a single specific pathogen but to a concatenation of different factors.
- 27.
Published in London and Bath. Apperley (1673–1735) held an MD from St. John’s College, Cambridge.
- 28.
Thomas Fuller’s Exanthematologia (London: 1730) argued that diseases originated in pathogenic particles streaming down from the upper regions of the universe. Ludvig Hektoen’s “Thomas Fuller, 1654–1734, Country Physician and Pioneer Exponent of Specificness in Infection and Immunity,” Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago (1922) 2:321–33 includes excerpts but is misleading.
- 29.
By “cholera,” Apperley did not mean the disease known by that name in the nineteenth century but a milder enteritis originally blamed on too much choler (one of the four humors) in the body.
- 30.
As late as 1787, the first medical examination for an MD degree in Aberdeen asked candidates to explain “How far may Acrimony be considered as existing in the system, and what are its effects?” Kenneth J. Rix, “A Short History of Medical Degrees in the University of Aberdeen,” Scottish Medical Journal (1990) 35:120–1, on 121.
- 31.
John Barker, An Inquiry into the Nature, Cause and Cure, of the Present Epidemic Fever. Together with Some General Observations concerning the Difference betwixt Nervous and Inflammatory Fevers.… (London, 1742). This was prompted by the great typhus epidemic of 1740–1 (see this chapter below). Barker served as a physician to the army in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession (1742–1748), making him a colleague of Pringle’s. He died in 1749 as a result of illness from his service. For his Leyden studies, see Underwood, Boerhaave’s Men, 160.
- 32.
Jean Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease in Six Books, trans. by William Barrowby (London: 1737). Barrowby (bap. 1709–1751) had an MB from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and became physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1750. He may have been one of the authors of a pro-inoculation tract with Isaac Schomberg and James Kilpatrick.
- 33.
Astruc believed that plague was contagious. Richard Mead cited Astruc in the preface to enlarged editions (1722 and 1744) of his Short Discourse on Pestilential Contagion, as an author who had “by strong reasoning and undeniable instances evinced the reality of contagion,” ninth edition, retitled A Discourse on the Plague (London: 1744), xv. Astruc, son of a Huguenot minister who converted to Catholicism, was a professor in Montpellier and later in Paris. A prolific medical author, he is best known as the founder of textual biblical criticism for asserting that Genesis was a compilation of different texts. Few studies consider both his medical and theological views, but see Ana M. Acosta, “Conjectures and Speculations: Jean Astruc, Obstetrics, and Biblical Criticism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2002) 35:256–66.
- 34.
Pierre Desault, A Treatise on the Venereal Distemper with Two Dissertations: The First on Madness from the Bite of Mad Creatures; The Second on Consumptions.…(1733) trans. John Andree (London: 1738). See also Margaret DeLacy, The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion and Society in Britain, 1660–1730 (New York: 2016), 125.
- 35.
James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (Berkeley: 1987).
- 36.
Charles F. Mullett, “The Cattle Distemper in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Agricultural History (1946) 20:144–65.
- 37.
See Lise Wilkinson, “Rinderpest and Mainstream Infectious Disease Concepts in the Eighteenth Century,” Medical History (1984) 28:129–50, on 141; DeLacy, Germ of an Idea.
- 38.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 147.
- 39.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 147, 149 and 150.
- 40.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 148.
- 41.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 148.
- 42.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 149.
- 43.
Cromwell Mortimer, “Some Account of the Distemper Raging among the Cow-Kind in the Neighbourhood of London…,” Phil. Trans. (1744–1745) 43:532–7; Mortimer, “Further Observations on the Distemper…,” Phil. Trans. (1744–1745) 43:549–55; Mortimer, “A Third Account of the Distemper among the Cows,” Phil. Trans. (1746–1747) 44: 4–10; see also Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 150.
- 44.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 150; 19 George II, c. 5.
- 45.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 150.
- 46.
Spinage, Cattle Plague, 64; John Barker, An Account of the Present Epidemical Distemper amongst the Black Cattle.… (London: 1745).
- 47.
Richard Brocklesby, An Essay concerning the Mortality, Now Prevailing among the Horned Cattle.… (London: 1746), online from Google, cited in Mullett, 151.
- 48.
Brocklesby, Essay concerning the…Horned Cattle.… (London, 1746). The Irish-born Brocklesby succeeded Pringle as physician to the army and implemented his recommendations. This was his first book, following his MD dissertation on saliva in 1745.
- 49.
Lobb, Letters (London, 1745). For Lobb’s views on the human plague, see also DeLacy, Germ of an Idea, 164.
- 50.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 147. Davies recommended separate “Barracs.”
- 51.
Lobb, Letters, quoted in Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 142.
- 52.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 158.
- 53.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 155.
- 54.
Davies, An Essay concerning Pestilential Contagion: Occasioned by the Distempers Now Raging among the Cattle (1748), 2nd edn (London: 1757). The second edition appeared under his own name.
- 55.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 142.
- 56.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 156.
- 57.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 156.
- 58.
C. Huygelen, “The Immunization of Cattle against Rinderpest in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Medical History (1997) 41:182–96.
- 59.
Huygelen, “Immunization,” 195.
- 60.
This was published in London. See also An Essay…Third Edition. To Which is Added, A Discourse on the Usefulness of Inoculation of the Horned Cattle.… (London: 1770). Layard also published A Letter to Joseph Banks, Esq…Relative to the Distemper among the Horned Cattle. Read at the Royal Society, June 15, 1780 (London: 1780).
- 61.
Layard came from a distinguished Huguenot family. See David C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, Chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV…, 3rd ed. (no place/publisher: 1886), vol. 2:323, online from Google.
- 62.
See below, this chapter.
- 63.
A Treatise on the Small Pox and Measles; Wherein the Origin, Nature, and the Different Sorts of Small Pox Are Largely Considered…also the Case of Inoculation, and the Nature and Cure of the Measles (London: 1747), a second translation, by Thomas Stack, appeared in 1748 as A Discourse on the Small Pox and Measles. There was a second edition in 1755.
- 64.
Roderick McGrew, “measles,” in Encyclopedia of Medical History (New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, 1985).
- 65.
See William Alexander Greenhill’s “translator’s introduction” to Abú Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakaríyá ar-Rází (Rhazes), A Treatise of the Smallpox and Measles (London: 1848), 3–6, online from Google. Rhazes’ book first appeared in a corrupt Latin edition in 1498; Mead’s edition was the first to include Rhazes’ distinction between measles and smallpox. See also The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, UK: 2003), 665.
- 66.
Richard Mead, A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion (London, 1720). Mead expanded his argument for contagion in the eighth edition. The ninth edition of this work appeared as A Discourse on the Plague in 1744. For Mead’s revisions, see Arnold Zuckerman, “Plague and Contagionism in Eighteenth-Century England: The Role of Richard Mead,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2004) 78:273–308.
- 67.
R. M. S. McConaghey’s “John Huxham,” Medical History (1969) 3:280 gives his date of birth as 1672 but this may be a misprint. Norman Moore’s “Huxham, John,” rev. by Richard Hankins, ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14319, has c.1692, as does William Schupbach’s “The Fame and Notoriety of Dr. John Huxham,” Medical History (1981) 25:415. Wallis’ Eighteenth-Century Medics (Newcastle, 1988) gives 1691, and Lester King’s The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago 1958), 130, has 1694. Huxham died in 1768.
- 68.
Moore, “Huxham.” Arians criticized the Church doctrine of the Trinity.
- 69.
Hallett was one of two Essex Presbyterian ministers whose refusal to subscribe to a declaration of belief in the Trinity led to the Salter’s Hall debates in 1719 and the breakdown of Presbyterian orthodoxy. See David L. Sykes, “Hallett, Joseph (II) (1656–1722),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12009.
- 70.
McConaghey, “Huxham,” 280.
- 71.
Moore, “Huxham.” See also William Schupbach, “Huxham,” 416. This may be apocryphal: this ploy also appears in the satire Medico Mastix; or, Physic Craft Detected (London, 1774) attributed to Ralph Schomberg. John Elliot’s letter in the Westminster Magazine, “The Character of Dr. Wriggle,” attributes similar behavior to John Coakley Lettsom.
- 72.
Schupbach, “Huxham.”
- 73.
First published in Latin as Observationes de Aëre et Morbis Epidemicis…. (London, 1739), and (London: 1752) English translation by his son, John Corham Huxam, published in London in 1759 (for 1728–1737) and 1767 (for 1738–1748), online from ECCO.
- 74.
Huxham, Observations…1728–1737, preface, xiii.
- 75.
Huxham, Observations…1728–1737, preface, xvi. “Squinzies” is an old form of “quinsy,” or sore throat; “fauces” refers to the area between the base of the tongue and the soft palate; in other words, colds and cold-like diseases in the first instance but possibly leading to more severe ailments.
- 76.
Huxham, Observations…1728–1737, preface, ii.
- 77.
John Huxham, An Essay on Fevers, 3rd ed. (1757), rpt with a new introduction by Saul Jarcho (New Delhi: 1986), 1–7.
- 78.
Huxham, Essay, 7.
- 79.
Huxham, Essay, 10.
- 80.
Huxham, Essay, 9.
- 81.
Huxham, Essay, 45.
- 82.
The “intermittent” fevers appear to have been forms of malaria, also known as “ague.” Malaria is characterized by very clearly delineated periods of fever and remission.
- 83.
Huxham, Essay, 11.
- 84.
Huxham, Essay, 24–5.
- 85.
Huxham, Essay, 29.
- 86.
Huxham, Essay, 28–9.
- 87.
Huxham, Essay, 63.
- 88.
Huxham, Essay, 54.
- 89.
Huxham, Essay, 68.
- 90.
Huxham, Essay, 55.
- 91.
Huxham, Essay, 56.
- 92.
Phthisis or consumption was also sometimes mentioned—for example, by Benjamin Marten and Gideon Harvey.
- 93.
London, 1748. Davies mentions plague, sweating sickness, sore throat, erysipelas, measles and smallpox. This work is sometimes attributed to Richard Davies’s uncle, John Davies, head of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and a close friend of Richard Mead’s. John Davies died in 1732 and so could not have written this treatise. Richard Davies published the second edition of this work under his own name in 1757, stating that the original manuscript had been read and approved by Mead, who had had it printed and had presented it to the Privy Council, which had ignored it.
- 94.
Davies, Essay, 5.
- 95.
Davies, Essay, 63.
- 96.
Davies, Essay, 55.
- 97.
Davies, Essay, 50.
- 98.
Davies, Essay, 50–1.
- 99.
This was also true of his important work on hematology. With many experiments, Davies not only showed that the blood comprises three different constituents but measured the specific gravity of each. George Gulliver wrote in his “Introduction” to the Sydenham Society edition of The Works of William Hewson (London: 1846), xl, that Davies’ “‘Essay,’…is admirably decisive. Yet it seems to have fallen dead-born from the press.” Despite Gulliver’s efforts at rehabilitation, repeated in his “Lectures on the Blood, Lymph, and Chyle of the Vertebrata,” in the Medical Times and Gazette II (1863), this neglect is mirrored by the terse entry about Davies in the ODNB. Gordon Goodwin, “Davies, Richard (d. 1761),” rev. Kaye Bagshaw (Oxford: 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7257. Davies, himself a Cambridge graduate, was a critic of the Test Act and the medical education provided by English universities.
- 100.
The first edition was published in 1748 by C. Davis in London. I used John Coakley Lettsom’s edition of Fothergill’s Works, vol. 1 (London: 1783) where it appears as “Account of the Putrid Sore-Throat.” This three-volume edition is online from the HathiTrust. On Fothergill, see Richard Hingston Fox, Dr. John Fothergill and His Friends: Chapters in Eighteenth-Century Life (London: 1919), online from the HathiTrust.
- 101.
Jeremy M. Norman ed., Morton’s Medical Bibliography, 5th ed. (Aldershot UK: 1991), 783, credits the Italian author Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia with the first account of an epidemic disease resembling scarlet fever (rossania or rossalia) in 1553 and Daniel Sennert with the first “scientific” description which contains details typical of scarlatina. However, Sennert did not mention a sore throat. Norman, Morton’s, 780, traces the first mention of diphtheria to Aretaeus the Cappadocian and credits Guillaume de Baillou with a description of the epidemic of diphtheria in Paris in 1576. Pierre-Fidele Bretonneau was the first medical author to provide an adequate differential diagnosis, history and full description. See also “Bretonneau on Diphtherite” in Robert Hunter Semple comp. and trans., Diphtheria from the Writings of Bretonneau, Guersant, Trousseau, Bochut, Empis and Daviot (London: 1859), 1–204.
- 102.
Fothergill, Account, 345.
- 103.
John Starr’s graphic description in “An Account of the Morbus strangulatorius…” Phil. Trans. (1749–1750), 46:435–46 includes a sketch of a false membrane. Francis Home, the professor of materia medica in Edinburgh, describes a sore throat that was probably diphtheria in Principia Medicinae (Edinburgh: 1758). He clearly described diphtheria as a clinical entity in An Inquiry into the Nature, Cause and Cure of the Croup (Edinburgh: 1765).
- 104.
Fothergill, Account, 350.
- 105.
Fothergill, Account, 353. Stephen Blancard’s Physical Dictionary, 4th edn (London: 1702) defines “sphacelus” as “a perfect Mortification with the extinction of the Native heat, and privation of Sense, not only in the Skin, Flesh, Nerve, Artery, but the very Bones. A Phacelus is distinguished from a Gangreen, by the total corruption and stink, it being also insensible of Knife and Fire.…”
- 106.
Fothergill, Account, 350.
- 107.
Fothergill, Account, 350–1. Erysipelas is also a streptococcal infection.
- 108.
Fothergill, Account, 376–7.
- 109.
Dale Smith notes that other early eighteenth-century physicians who argued against bloodletting in fevers included William Hillary (in the diseases of 1728), Ebenezer Gilchrist (nervous fevers, 1734), Theophilus Lobb (1735, all fevers) and Browne Langrish (1735, slow fevers). See his “Medical Science, Medical Practice, and the Emerging Concept of Typhus in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in W. F. Bynum and V. Nutton, eds., Theories of Fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Medical History, Supplement No. 1) (London: 1981), 121–34. None of these doctors had an English university education.
- 110.
Fox, Fothergill, 50 describes this as “caustic copper acetate.” It seems to be the same as the “Oxymel Aeruginis” or Oxymel of Verdigris in Duncan’s Edinburgh New Dispensatory, 582, obtained by mixing verdigris (copper acetate) with vinegar and honey. It was used externally for cleansing “foul ulcers.”
- 111.
Fothergill, Account, 403. By “virus” Fothergill meant “poison,” not virus in the modern sense.
- 112.
Fothergill, Account, 403–4.
- 113.
J. F. Payne, “Letherland, Joseph (1699–1769),” rev. Claire L. Nutt, ODNB (Oxford: 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16521. Letherland had an MD from Leyden (1724). He was a friend of William Heberden Sr, who recommended his appointment as physician to Queen Charlotte.
- 114.
Evidently, Letherland declined any acknowledgment when the book was initially published, but in the fifth edition, published in 1769 after Letherland had died, Fothergill did acknowledge his help. For Chandler’s works on colds, see Chapter 5.
- 115.
This was more informative about the stratagems of some young physicians than about Lettsom himself. It appeared in the The Westminster Magazine for 1781 and is published in full in James Johnston Abraham, Lettsom: His Life, Friends and Descendents (London: 1933), 212–215. Lettsom’s verdict on Elliot, “I pity him sincerely … he is sadly distressed,” is more accurate than Abraham’s, who confuses him with Sir John Elliot, Bart, MD, whom he described as a “notorious high-liver.” The John Elliot who wrote Fothergill’s biography was even more scandalous than the baronet. Rejected by an alderman’s niece, he shot a pistol at her before trying to kill himself at her feet. The defense argued that he was insane. He was sent to Newgate and died in jail. John Mollon, “Elliot, John (1747–1787),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8679.
- 116.
John Coakley Lettsom, “Some Account of the Late John Fothergill, M.D., F.R.S., Read before the Medical Society of London, July 17, and October 23, 1782,” in The Works of John Fothergill, vol. 3, ed. John Coakley Lettsom (London: 1784), xxviii–xxx. Lettsom’s paper seems to have been for Fothergill’s own Society of (Licentiate) Physicians, not Lettsom’s London Medical Society. Many of the members of the former had been intimate friends of Fothergill, so we may assume that Lettsom is correct.
- 117.
George Aspinwall, A Dissertation on the Cynanche maligna (Dedham MA: 1798), 5. In an overview of the history of bloodletting, “The Influence of Tradition on Medical Progress” (Lancaster: 1879), C. Johnson mentions Robert Hamilton, James Sims, Martin Wall, William Withering, Samuel Parr, David Campbell, John Heysham and Jonathan Binns as opponents to venesection. He attributes their caution to the strength of clinical observation in the later eighteenth century and credits the revival of venesection to the importation of continental pathological theories in the early nineteenth century. However, he could also have attributed the earlier preference for milder therapy to Fothergill’s influence on these authors. I thank the Lancaster (UK) City Library for enabling me to see this document. Paul Kopperman adds William Buchan and John Millar to the list of critics of venesection and notes that the last third of the eighteenth century saw a reduction in venesection in Britain, “‘Venerate the Lancet’: Benjamin Rush’s Yellow Fever Therapy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2004) 78:538–574, 553; and see Kopperman, “The Drive toward More Moderate Therapies in British Medicine, 1750–1800,” Proceedings of the 37th. International Congress on the History of Medicine in 2000 (Galveston Texas: 2002): 266–74.
- 118.
George Cleghorn, Observations on the Epidemical Diseases in Minorca from the Year 1744 to 1749 (1751), 4th ed. (London: 1779), 132. This was based on Cleghorn’s contemporaneous notes, supplemented by books that Fothergill sent to him. Most eighteenth-century physicians attributed malaria, seen as an entire category of “intermittent fevers,” to miasmas emanating from swamps and damps. See Huxham’s comments above. Cleghorn’s book is also notable because he used a thermometer to measure fevers (163 and 264) and because he was a strong proponent of cinchona for intermittent fevers. See Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, rev. Thomas Thomson (London: 1875), Vol. 2, “Cleghorn”.
- 119.
”Inflammatory” fevers were characterized by heat, frequent and hard pulse, reddish urine and an “inflammatory” crust in blood taken by venesection. Christine Hallett, “The Attempt to Understand Puerperal Fever in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Influence of Inflammation Theory,” Medical History (2005) 49:1–28 provides a helpful explanation of this idea.
- 120.
Among the anti-venesectionists mentioned above, Hillary and Binns were also Yorkshire Quakers; Hillary and Fothergill were apprenticed to the same apothecary; Lettsom and Binns also shared a master. See also John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient (Cambridge: 2005), 66–7.
- 121.
Fox, Fothergill, 37–8.
- 122.
Keith Thomas, “Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: 2006), 56–83; Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven: 2009), 150; Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: 2007), 185–270.
- 123.
For Pietist cleanliness, see Carter Lindberg, introduction to The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Malden, MA: 2005), 9.
- 124.
Richard Mead, Short Discourse, 41.
- 125.
Mead, Short Discourse, 41.
- 126.
Mead, Short Discourse, 42–3. For Pringle’s reference to the same event, see Chapter 3.
- 127.
George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London: 1724), online from Google. Cheyne surrounded this straightforward advice with a cloud of explanation, qualifications and anecdotes.
- 128.
Deborah Madden, A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine: Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley’s “Primitive Physic” (Amsterdam: 2007), 35–6, 68–70, 166–7 and 195.
- 129.
Creighton, History of Epidemics, vol. 2. From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time (Cambridge: 1894), 78, online from the HathiTrust.
- 130.
Creighton, History of Epidemics, 2:78.
- 131.
Creighton, History of Epidemics, 2:79. In addition to Barker and Huxham, this fever was described by John Wall of Worcester, Ebenezer Gilchrist of Dumfries and Daniel Cox, Observations on the Present Epidemic Fever (London: 1741) (Cox was a London physician not, as Creighton claimed, an apothecary). There were also letters in The Gentleman’s Magazine.
- 132.
Creighton noted that the death rate in London for 1741 reached the highest level of the century. Creighton, History of Epidemics, 2:80.
- 133.
Creighton, History of Epidemics, 2:80.
- 134.
Eric McCoy North, Early Methodist Philanthropy (New York: 1914), 36–7, online from Google.
- 135.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 41. Wesley also visited the Quaker almshouse and school at Clerkenwell in 1744. Tom Hitchcock, “Bellers, John (1654–1725),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2050.
- 136.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 50, citing Crookshank, History of Methodism in Ireland, 2:21 points out that the Association of Friends of the Sick Poor, a Methodist visiting society in Waterford, formed the nucleus of the effort to establish the first fever hospital in Ireland (1799). See also Charles Creighton, History of Epidemics 2:249.
- 137.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 38.
- 138.
Madden, Wesley’s “Primitive Physic,” 168. See also 36–7. For a much broader view, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: 2002). Wesley’s use of the word “primitive” is significant: it implies a return to an “unspoiled” or “pristine” state analogous to a “prisca theologia” and “prisca sapientia,” (pure theology and uncorrupted wisdom).
- 139.
Madden, Wesley’s “Primitive Physic,” 168.
- 140.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 41–2.
- 141.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 42.
- 142.
Thomas Secker (1693–1763) was educated at Dissenting academies and earned an MD at Leyden before taking orders in the Church of England in 1722.
- 143.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 143.
- 144.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 45.
- 145.
Fox, Fothergill, 44.
- 146.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 38.
- 147.
McCoy, Methodist Philanthropy, 139.
- 148.
One partial exception was physician Thomas Dover who volunteered to visit the sick in their homes and children in the workhouse for the Bristol Corporation of the Poor in 1697. He saw many patients with “spotted fever,” which may have been typhus or measles. Dover wrote in his Ancient Physician’s Legacy (1732) that he had begun treating the poor on his arrival in Dover in 1695. For the political context of the workhouse, see Jonathan Barry, “John Cary and the Legacy of Puritan Reform,” in The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000, ed. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (Aldershot UK: 2005), 185–206. For the possible Quaker influence on this institution, see 199.
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DeLacy, M. (2017). Fever Theory and British Contagionism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. In: Contagionism Catches On . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50959-4_2
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